That Implied Necessity
by skywalker05
Summary: A Red vs Blue miscellany filled with drabbles, prompt responses, and the occasional crossover. Wash/CT, Church/Tex, Sarge/Tex, York/Carolina, gen, etc..
1. Competitive Nature

This is a short story collection where I can deposit all my RvB fics that are under a thousand words or so. Most are prompt fills from tumblr. Requests are always open.

The first prompt was simply for York/Carolina. Rated K+.

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><p>Sometimes he just sat and looked at her as she lounged on the other side of the couch, running her fingers through her hair.<p>

But York couldn't have silence for very long. It bothered him like music from another room, loud enough for the beat to come through but too quiet and tinny to identify the song. So he slid over. "Hey, man."

She opened her eyes. "York."

"What?"

"I'm concentrating."

"Sorry, it looked like you were sitting here combing your hair."

"It helps me concentrate."

There was some silence. He idly kicked the back of his legs against the couch. "What are you concentrating on?"

"Tomorrow's mission."

"But we don't even really know what this heist is about yet."

"We know what planet it's on, and that we need to retrieve an item. A lot could go wrong. It requires planning."

"So you're planning it all out in your head?"

"As many scenarios as seem plausible at this stage in the game." She shut her eyes and ran her hands through her hair again, but instead of a comfortable flattening of her palm against the side of her head this was a nervous pluck of her fingers through her bangs. "I'm fine."

"I think you're driving yourself crazy, actually."

She opened her eyes.

He smiled. "There's something going on in the rec room, I think South's throwing darts at Maine again. Wanna go see?"

"No. I have to concentrate."

"No-o-o…"

"I have to be the best."

"Look, C, that board or the Director's approval might be a competition, but being social is not."

"Did you just call me 'C'?"

"Yes. Look." He eased closer to her, draped his arm over the back of the couch just close enough to her shoulders so he could hug her if he needed to.

"Yes it is, York." She snapped, cutting off his words by returning to the former topic. "It has to be."

"Or what?"

"Or else I might lose."

He looked at her for a moment, picturing the muzzle flash of her pistol at the firing range.

He said, "Man, some things are competitions. Some things, like talking or hanging out with friends, or playing Go Fish, are not."

"Wash was hoarding the threes."

"Carolina-"

"I'm fine."

"You're not going to lose."

She looked down, lowering her chin to that half-asleep angle she had been propped in before.

He whispered in her ear. "It's not a competition."

"Yes it is."

He propped his arm around her shoulders and she didn't seem to mind, because she crowded closer to him and bumped her head against his chest, turning her denial of his help into a rhythm: "Yes it is yes it is yes it is."

He gave up and buried his face in her hair. "No it's not no it's not no it's not."


	2. Imagination Station

Tumblr asked for Joker from Mass Effect/ 479 from Red vs Blue. This a brilliant idea, seeing as they're pretty much the same person. Rated K+.

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><p>He was waiting in the hangar when she came back from the briefing. He hobbled more noticeably than usual, one hand out flat against the wall like maybe it would work as the crutches he left behind, but the first two fingers on his other hand traced the computer-chip designs on the Mother of Invention's interior. His face was furrowed, shadowed by the hat: he didn't take his eyes off the wall when he heard her steps. "What kind of drive's on this thing? Probably handles like a hippopotamus but the power's gotta be incredible - think he'll let me take it?"<p>

She stalked past him under her mirrored helmet, boots clicking, because this was the way she usually walked. "No."

"Aww." He grinned. "Not if I ask really nicely?"

"It's top secret. You're lucky you're allowed to walk in the hanger."

Joker leaned off the wall. "Top secret. Right. What do they have that's so special? That AI? Normandy's got one too."

"I don't know, Joker, I just fly the planes. Which is what you should be doing right now if we're gonna end this little field trip."

"I thought it was 'take your friend to work day'."

"That too, except I don't have any friends so I had to pick you. Come on."

He tried. He let go of the wall, which had to be some kind of effort, and then he toddled. Because the universe may have faster-than-light speed and MAC canons and artificial intelligence, but it just resisted people's efforts to fix some things.

She stomped back and pushed her elbow under his arm, a not-so-gentle bump that elicited an angry mumble, and struggled him back to the Normandy's shuttle.


	3. The Dark One

Not actually a prompt, I just frakking love Wash (being run over by cars).

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><p>He felt the tires chew at his legs, thick treads bumping and creaking against the armor. It scraped and he climbed, all his weight on his elbows as he leaned forward and fired onetwothree bursts toward the faces of the Reds. The car bucked and there was this long lurching moment when Wash felt himself freed of the car and everything letting go, the shotgun not even ripping from his fingers but just drifting like a tattered flag. He landed on his back, and then there was the sergeant pointing the barrel of a gun at him and then the reactions around him started.<p>

There was fire and the kick of explosions and yellow shockwaves. Wash felt one of his legs give out. He ducked his head and his vision blackened, maybe the helmet slapping protective shields down over his smarting eyes and maybe he was just forgetting how to see. Another explosion knocked a barrel over his head and he fell, finding himself at ground level beside the charred remains of shifted cargo. He lay there for a second.

He got up. That didn't quite work, at first—he wondered why the first thing he splayed his hand on rolled away from him, and why his knee wouldn't hold him. He felt a fierce aching pain down every joint in his right side and a thick swelling at the back of his jaw that popped when he tried to form words. His right side leaned like a building burning and he tried to catch at the ground with the toes of his boot. _The Meta is out there somewhere. It could still capture the medical officer, who could bring them to Epsilon who could bring them to the Councillor._

(Wash occasionally wonders how he has ever come to a point in his life where finding Epsilon would count as a good thing. Then he stops wondering.)

He looked up. His armor was telling him that his shields were down and his health was down. His body was telling him that his right shoulder was aching. For some reason, the one bullet wound South put into his back was aching. Thatwas the left side, it should be protected by the armor and not aching, but Wash knew that when he next looked in the mirror the tissue would still be crinkled and white.

Thinking about one bullet wound reminded Wash of them all. His mind jumped along the paths Epsilon taught it.

Back in the city, the Meta had gotten one shot into his leg and one into his side just next to his stomach. Wash was out for only half a minute, barely any time at all, and then he woke up to feel the healing unit pumping adrenaline into his system.

_(Stop it, these are memories that feel like—)_

His eyes went wide although he wasn't sure what he was seeing (it was the sky, just the sky, eggshell-white and Carolina-blue).

_(Stop it, these are memories—)_

And back before he knew what exactly South had done, he felt the healing unit speed up and hum, working hard without an AI to use it, although the neural shakes it gave him weren't really much compared to Epsilon, not enough to distract him from the pain and the sudden knitting at his back and the electric warmth.

At least they were his memories. Just the fact that he knew they were gives him a little bit of clarity.

And then it was gone again, because the Warthog roared past and everything was fire.


	4. Alma Mater

Prompt: Wash and Maine are bros.

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><p>Maine had a habit of leaving sweatshirts on the floor.<p>

Mostly the things he wore were these thick, white fleeces almost as heavy as his armor. Maine liked baggy clothes, or else just didn't care about his clothing and wanted to be as comfortable as possible outside the armor. He also liked leaving laundry all over the floor, which Wash had learned the first full day they roomed together. Maine was messy. Wash had never asked whether he was like that because no one ever checked the Freelancers' rooms, or whether his commanding officers in other companies just hadn't told him off enough.

Either way, Wash had to kick some of Maine's stuff aside as he walked toward his own impeccably made bed. Some lettering on one of the sweatshirts caught his eye. "Hey, Maine."

The big Freelancer was sitting on his bed holding a datapad. He looked up.

"Does this sweatshirt say 'Harvard'?"

"Rrrr."

Wash turned the shirt over with the toe of his boot. "Maine. Did you go to Harvard?"

Maine said, "My brother."

"Oh."

He pictured a whole family of Maine children sitting around a table, all of them bulky and in white-and-yellow helmets. Then he mentally edited the helmet part out and got down to trying to process this Maine sitting next to a brainiac kid, or maybe just a really businesslike one in a suit and tie. The older brother saying "Hey man, I'm going to school, see you later," and Maine, maybe just to shock them all, saying "I'm joining the army."

He wouldn't need his voice there, anyway.

Wash stayed in the room for a while, just getting things in order.


	5. Justice

This one wasn't a prompt, it just became necessary after "North loves superheroes" sunk far enough into my headcanon. Inspired by _The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, _which is amazing and everyone should read it.

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><p>One day, they made the mistake of giving him a comic book.<p>

There had been a whole pile of them, sitting on the thin-legged brown table in the middle of the common area for crazy soldiers. Wash didn't want to look at them. He sat where he usually did, in a blue chair near the window, rifling his fingers through his hair or around the criss-cross pattern of scars at the back of his neck. Sometimes he had to remind himself that he was still here.

But then an aid came over and handed him a floppy bundle of papers in the shape of a comic. "Hello David. Would you like to read?"

Wash took the book. Might as well look at it, right? He was used to taking the things people handed him: confidentiality forms, trays of food, pills. The paper slid in his fingers. At first he just recognized colors, blurry blue and red made up of big dots the size of the targeting reticle on a sniper rifle. Then he saw the words.

(These aren't Epsilon memories, they're just...they're so strong, the image of North setting his comics down on the table or York reading in the common room in the middle of the night, his feet up by the coffee machine.)

Wash said, "No."

The aid retreated right away, leaving the book in Wash's hands. "All right, David. Would you prefer something else?"

"No."

Wash lunged.

He punched, grabbed, hooked one arm around to snap the aide's thin elbow and then there were security guys on him, pulling at his shoulders. He whipped his head back and cracked his skull against someone else's. All of them writhing, Wash pulled them across the room and knocked over the table.

"No, no, no, you're not actually going to give me Captain America-"

With all the denial of how stupid the hospital staff could possibly be, with all the thoughts of North and York and South, Wash fought his aides all the way down the hall until someone jabbed a syringe into his bicep and everything went slack.


	6. Death

This may be all I ever write about Church. I'm not sure if it's in-character for him to even go this long without swearing.

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><p>Church didn't like worlds where people died fast. At least in his case he'd seen it coming: he should have known that that idiot rookie Caboose was going to run somebody over or shoot them very accidentally in the face some time soon. It was inevitable, like the sun never setting. But now, he hadn't thought of Caboose as 'rookie' in a really long time, and man did South die fast.<p> 


	7. Prisoner

Season 7 Wash.

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><p>He would slam on the doors every once in a while, just to see what they would do. He heard the guards mutter about the crazy Freelancer, the one who went under the knife, and instead of thinking about exactly how many knives he'd been under in the past few years he would ram his shoulder against the door like an animal, like the Meta, just to show them that he still had three hundred pounds of weight behind him and could use it. They hadn't taken his armor because they didn't have the technology. That required robot arms (not sentient) and computers (not-sentient) and people who knew how to use them. The UNSC guards thought Wash was crazy partially because he kept expecting things to be sentient, and if that was crazy, what kind of world was this?<p> 


	8. She Functioned for a Short Time

York + Carolina. Mozzarella Project is York and South's favorite punk band.

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><p>Under the hall lights it was okay, but step into the common room and its dark, closeted air pressed in on him. He asked Delta to manifest, which the AI did silently and efficiently, like he did most things. The green light was reassuring, oh-so-reassuring but it was also familiar, and so many of the familiar things had gone away. A month ago there would be lights on in the rooms at this hour, York's door propped open and South propped in the doorway talking to North about something, a datastick of the newest Mozzarella Project album gesturing in one long-fingered hand. It wasn't late, not on the planet the Mother of Invention checked its clocks by. CT and Carolina's door would be closed, the number-one Freelancer in there somewhere studying or exercising, and CT laying on the couch staring daggers at the coffee.<p>

Now, the doors were closed and there weren't any slivers of light on the ground. Everyone was trying to sleep if they still could. York looked around at all of the pads that housed electronic locks. Delta tried to reassure him with that close green light but it didn't affect York in the usual way this time. He needed something else. Delta wouldn't want to know that he wasn't being one hundred precent efficient, he'd probably try to up his illumination or something, and so York did not voice his concerns.

And then he saw other colored lights, one blue and one off-pink, and turned to see Carolina stamping down the corridor. York eased further into the common room, holding a finger to his mask as if Delta could understand the shush sign — as if he needed to be shushed, when he could just reach into York's mind and figure out the next order.

Carolina reached the fork in the corridor and turned around, hunched a little and coming back toward him like she was going to berate him for being out so late. She ignored him. She reached the common room and, just feet away from him, turned and stomped back around again, retracing her steps. Beta and Zeta clung to her shoulders, and as York watched he thought he saw them crowd closer like they were searching for warmth. Their disparate glows reflected off her blue armor, creating a mix of colors that just touched Delta's at the edges.

York still didn't have enough light, but he was pretty sure she didn't either.


	9. Overwhelming Memories

Prompt: Overwhelming Memories

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><p>He's got a cat. That's a nice thing. Soft fur, warm on his palm, something he can curl his fingers into. Everything he's supposed to do and be and save is behind a gray glass wall but he can't get there. He has to be here, with these needles stitch-tracking into his skin. They're going to pierce any time now.<p>

"David. How do you feel."

He's got a cat. He/she/it/cat pushes a hard nose full of whiskers against the knuckle of his thumb. It's got a snaggletooth, but it doesn't really hurt. It's just an awareness. The pain is a distant, hazy….

but even that brings memories.

Driving down a dirt road, squinting against the dust from another car. It's a big, rude pickup with a Texas plate.

The cat is sitting on his lap near the arm of the chair, near the square of sunlight coming through the window. He/she/it is brown and striped. Wash keeps one hand in the warm fur under the cat's armpit and fumbles at the tags with the other. The name is "Vicky." He likes that name. No E's.

Outside, there's yellow sun and green grass. They set him up with a nice room. The doctors are in white coats and UNSC patches. Medics. Wash won't ever have civilian care again.

Vicky pushes her head against his hand, annoyed that the scratching's stopped.

"David." The doctor inclines his head. He's younger than Wash, blonde.

Wash cups his palm along the cat's back and strokes its thin spine until the purring starts, simple and satisfied. Epsi…Leonard…that other person…never had cats. There's a lot of hot dusty roads and a lot of pain hidden in that other head lurking next to the glass partition in Wash's mind, but cats don't make any memories overwhelm him.

He says, "I'm doing fine, doctor."


	10. Too Late For Regrets

Prompt: Too Late For Regrets. Wash/CT

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><p>She is already desert-dry and sun-stilled in her head, but he's right there like cold rain rolling off of mountains and laying his head against her shoulder, <em>so what are you supposed to do now, ConnieCTConnie, just take off and lead the enemy to them? You know you're right, you know you're saving everybody and putting the Director down, but just look at Wash. Too stupid and noble to see the corruption in front of his face.<em>

He's pressing his lips against her shirtsleeve because he's cold and wants her to hold him.

She can hear the betrayal in his voice already, imagine it in his eyes or the golden mask.

_What are you going to do, Connie, leave—_


	11. Conquered Spirit

Prompt: Conquered Spirit

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><p>Tex sits in her room and looks at the repair they made to her arm.<p>

She doesn't room with the other Freelancers. There's no reason to. She's better than them anyway. She's made from different stuff.

The techs re-wove parted wires and made sure all systems were running smoothly, all hydraulics sliding.

Tex looks at the pipes that have been fixed and moves her shoulder in a circle slowly. She doesn't think about anything at all.


	12. Sailing Away

I wrote this the morning after episode 19, in something of an attempt to console myself. Wash/CT.

My headcanon has it that Carolina's AI were Beta and Zeta, and that she roomed with CT.

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><p>Wash wonders where CT's gone sometimes, when Epsilon is going through every memory or fantasy he ever had. Wash can't really tell which is which, but they always head back to a frenzied, regretful desire for Allison or a desperate, confused need for the Alpha. Wash wants and needs to be able to tell which is his memory and which was brought into him. For some reason, right now the only certainty he's got in the world is that CT was from his life, not Epsilon's, but he can't quite remember why thinking of her always makes him feel so weighted-down.<p>

She left, or something. He called her Connie, or everyone did, but he liked the way the sounds felt soft in his mouth. He wonders whether he knew her before he joined Freelancer, but can only remember blue light from a scoreboard, and every single time Epsilon saw blue.

She'd told him she was taking away the soft name.

When he tries to think about the day she left his memories get crowded with 'why did she do it' and 'why did I watch' and 'how did I just listen when the counselor oh-so-calmly used words like 'transmissions from the inside' and 'possible compromise''? Then Epsilon takes over for a bit, which is almost an escape (at least Allison wasn't his). Connie had said "Mind your own business," but he couldn't. Not now. He needed an anchor.

But she had pulled up and sailed away.

He can't quite remember her last day. She had gone cold a long time before that, keeping her mask on around him when she could.

But why had she left?

What had been the last thing she'd said to him? He didn't want it to be that snapping retort as she walked away and he wondered if he'd heard her talking to someone, or had seen an unfamiliar face on the screen.

A female voice says, "Wash?" It isn't Connie, so he doesn't care.

Those couldn't have been his last words to him.

Epsilon whirs like a top when Wash tries to ignore him.

"Hey, Washington."

He opens his eyes.

It's Carolina; black pants, blue shirt, helmet under her arm. Usual Carolina. "What are you doing here?"

York comes into the room after her: Hawaiian shirt, ripped jeans. Usual York. His expression twists as soon as he sees Wash. "You've got your own bed, man, you should use it sometimes."

Carolina says, "Get him out of here." Beta and Zeta guard her shoulders.

York goes to pull Wash by the arm, and Wash lets him. Why was he here, anyway? The Alpha wasn't here, and he isn't going to find him by laying down in a bed that's been made to regulations standards in preparation for a new occupant. Whoever's going to be Carolina's roommate hasn't shown up yet. If she had one before, someone to commiserate and bicker with like Wash had Maine, she didn't leave anything personal behind.

Epsilon transmits endless rows out Alphas out toward Delta.

Wash is shaky, but he follows York out toward his own room well enough. There's this vague sense that it was important for him to be in Carolina's room, but he couldn't say why. Maybe it was just one of Epsilon's hunches. Maybe it was something about Allison.


	13. Betrayal

Another one of me attempting to deal with episode 19. Hints of Wash/CT.

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><p>It is easy to make contact with the bad guys from the ship where the good guys eat, work, and conspire together. It's not like she imagined it, no shadowy meetings in dirty alleys with people wearing dark glasses. She's surprised at how much they know about the Mother of Invention already, but after that she's just surprised about how easy it is to contact them.<p>

So she keeps taking more risks, making more stupid mistakes. She leaves firewalls down to test how much attention FLYSS really pays to personal communications. She holds meetings in hallways out in the open, protected digitally but geographically they're right there, in a hallway people pass through to get to armor processing. She wonders if anyone will notice. She wonders if anyone will bother to question her.

When they talk, she and her contact leave their helmets on. She thinks maybe they'll respect her more of they can't see the lines on her face that make her look so young. In fact, she's been taking the mask off less and less, lately, trying to turn her identity into something harder and scarier, and as dry as a bone in the desert.

So when Wash shows up and she can see herself in his visor, small and tense and drab, she waits for him to press the question. If he didn't have so much faith in the good guys he'd demand to see the records on the computer, not that she'd left anything to find.

She gave Wash a chance to keep asking her things, to show that he cared enough to not mind his own business, to push a little -

She'd done the same thing when she'd changed her name, turning her back to see if he would follow. (He would have followed York.)  
>Almost tripping over her own feet out of fear, she turned her back again.<p>

He didn't follow.

She has always had betrayed in her, swimming in her blood with all the other cells, and the betrayal eventually affected on her is just a manifestation of that other one that has been happening every yeardaysecond since she left, so there's something right about it, like taking the armor off and finding the wound still there.

(That's not right, it isn't right, somewhere something must be healing.) 


	14. Enforcement

**A/N: **from tumblr

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><p>Carolina is still missing, but Wash feels some of the weight of worry slough off him as the Falcon hovers on its rotors. The dust it kicks up obscures the sight of Team B getting to their feet. The landscape is dusty and tan. Team B appears to have been using an overturned police car as cover: the blue and yellow stripe on the white body is barely visible. There had been no heroism here. As much as Wash does not think of himself as a hero he understands that sometimes he does heroic things, and jumping off of an exploding building into a Falcon is one of them. Team B didn't have a job that would make a good story like Wash's would.<p>

He squints to make out CT walking with Wyoming's arm thrown over her shoulders. Wash moves forward to help her out but she steps onto the floating blood bay of her own accord and throws the heavier Freelancer into the seat next to North. "Good job team," North pants. "Hey, Wash."

"Hey man. How'd everything go out here?" He's replying to North but turns to look at CT.

"Not so good. Ready for extraction?"

479 interrupts over TEAMCOM. "I'm ready, if you all get your butts in here."

Far more quickly than expected, CT had slipped out of the bay again. He follows her without thinking. She bends down next to the underbelly of the car and picks up Wyoming's fallen sniper rifle. Wash turns to look at her, feeling all the confusion and slack-jawed inability that he usually does around her. His story may have sounded heroic but splaying his hands and lowering his shoulders won't give be any evidence of that right now.

"I forgot it," she muttered. "I just forgot."

She heaves the rifle over her shoulder like it's top heavy. Retrieve equipment when possible. That's protocol. Of course you retrieve your teammate's fallen gun when you're three steps away from it, but she makes it sound like a punishment.

And then she hops back into the ship, and he follows.

"Finally. Hang on, everybody." 479 accelerates. Wash feels the ground tip beneath him and wraps a hand around a support next to her. The engines are roaring but he is gentleman enough or awkward enough to tip his head to the side, offering her the seat.

Her helmet's brow is low. When she looks down, pointing her yellow glare somewhere at the divots on his chest instead of at his eyes, she looks like a cornered animal. "There were cops shooting at us, Wash."

"I know. Are you okay?"

"They were just following their orders."

She stalks off, rocking against the sway of the ship, and sits down two seats away.

He slams down into his seat and pulls the harness over his head and shoulders, clicking it into place. Across the bay, Wyoming's head is nodding loosely. North has just finished strapping Wyoming in, but then turns to look at Wash.

They say nothing.


	15. You Look So Good In Blue

**A/N: **from tumblr.

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><p>Sometimes Wash wonders what CT would say to him now. She would sit holding his Blue team helmet in her lap. She would ask, "How did you get one with the yellow stripe?"<p>

"It didn't have it originally," he would say. "This was the Alpha's."

She would snatch her hands off the mask.


	16. Modulation

**A/N: **from tumblr.

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><p>They're holding recruiting for mercenaries at a bar. Maybe that's how it always happens. CT doesn't know. Anyway there's the armed and armored crowd in the corner signing up recruits and then there's the normal bar people, men in plaid and women in Daisy Duke shorts. CT finds herself looking at the women from behind her mask and wondering what they would look like in the war, which patch of skin would first get scratched. Carolina was beautiful but she could never be this softly, fakely perfect. Then CT wonders what Wash would think if he were here (because she does that sometimes. Usually he thinks <em>stop that<em> or _come back to me_ or _that's against Insurrectionist protocol_.) Maybe he would look at those women out of the corner of his eye. Maybe he would be drawn, feeling his skin prickle, and follow them.

So she flicks the voice modulator on as a last minute addition, barely a thought. This way, if people leave/cheat/ogle/succeed she doesn't have to care any more. She creates a disconnect. Then she stands up and joins the other people in armor.


	17. Perusing the Archive

**Characters: **Wash, CT

**Rating: **K+

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><p>He found her<p>

and then he found Epsilon.

He thinks for a moment that she might just be a memory. The AI containment unit is sending out waves of sound. Maybe it was sending out memory as well. Wash can't be sure.

Except later, when he holds the sandy helmet in shaking, desperately gripping hands and looks at the Epsilon unit lying beside the Meta in the dark, he's pretty sure this is real. If finding CT had been an Alpha-memory or and Epsilon-trick the whole scenario would have turned out better - she would have been alive, and _then _he would have seen her buried and covered in sand. That was the kind of emotional whiplash that tore Alpha apart.

But this doesn't feel like a memory or a torture device. The sand slips out from between Wash's fingers, blending into the rest of the cooling desert. Epsilon/Alpha/Leonard are self-centered. Torture designed to break Alpha apart would have been more immediate and intense than this. Wash knows the loss of CT is real because the death itself happened without him. It wasn't designed for him.

It just happened, without design.

And of course that's worse.


	18. Our Way

**Characters: **Wash, Meta

**Rating: **K+

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><p><em>"It means peace talks have broken down. Now we do it our way."<em>

Some time in the past few hours the Meta's way - brutal, simple vengeance for crimes the person in front of him had not committed - had become "our way". Wash didn't want to be like the Meta, or like any of the AI swirling around in what remained of Maine's skull.

But the important thing over the past few days hadn't been brutality or vengeance. It certainly hadn't been about Red and Blue teams, or about the team the Freelancers had used to be.

Simplicity was what mattered. Getting Epsilon back (_why was Wash doing that, why would he want to do that?_) was simple. The Meta's forearm smashing across Doc's face was simple.

Killing these aliens was going to be simple.


	19. Speed of Flight

**Pairing: **Carolina/York

**Rating: **K+

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><p>Carolina had never really tested how fast she could sprint in the armor. She wasn't able to get up to speed in the Mother of Invention; there wasn't enough space. On one hand she enjoyed the feeling of potential still held back and bridled. She hadn't given her all yet, so no one had seen just how good she could be. There was always some good held in reserve; Carolina's ability to hold some back while at the same time giving her all was part of the secret to her success. Like a chess master, she worked three moves ahead of her opponent, although she would never have sat still long enough to play chess, and her opponent was the world.<p>

Average highway speed was seventy miles an hour, and she didn't think the Sprint augmentation would get her up to that. She was curious, though. There had to be somewhere where she could try.

She was thinking about this as she marched out of the training track, spotted with sweat and tugging her helmet off. Her hair was plastered to her face and sticking to her lips. She brushed it away, and when she lowered her hand she saw York standing beside the door.

He said, "Hey man."

She kept walking. He would follow her. That was a given. Her boots did not click on the floor so much as stomp, like the nearly three hundred pounds of frustration that she was when she wore armor and couldn't actually use all of its capabilities.

York said, "How'd it go? You were testing the Sprint, right?"

She didn't look at him. "It doesn't work. I need more space."

"Aw." He made a soft, endearing sound that was half growl.

She didn't slow down. "I've got cool-down exercises. You coming with me?"

"I thought we could have some coffee."

She headed for armor processing. "You always want coffee."

"It's God's gift to man. Or FLYSS's."

She just had to turn, because his voice was cracking a little because he was trying not to laugh too hard at his own jokes. She kept walking. Slowly. "I need to be able to use this augmentation. It's not just about armor. I need to be prepared."

"You will be." He smiled. The skin around his eyes crinkled.

She shifted away, a little. Slowly.

He reached out for her wrist, fingers scratching at the blue gauntlet. "Sometimes it's okay to move slow, 'Lina."

She narrowed her eyes. "Sometimes," she said, "it's not."

She grabbed his wrist, bunched the collar of his shirt in her hands, and kissed him.


	20. Like Love and Going Blind

**Pairing: **Carolina/York

**Rating: **K+

**Inspired by: **Jeffrey Foucalt's "Train to Jackson"

* * *

><p>The medics tell York that he shouldn't go out on the mission because he will not be able to see. His depth perception is gone. But he pokes at the buttons on the attending medic's coat and shrugs, leaning back into the hospital bed. "It'll be fine, Frank."<p>

(York knows the medics. Carolina calls them "Doc" usually and Wash calls them "those stupid medics!" for some reason York doesn't know. York calls them Frank and Maurice and Laura. Laura has three kids back home.)

"It's not just your depth perception, Agent York. There's a precedent in these kind of cases for someone to become…skittish. Afraid of losing the other eye."

Blinking is hard for York, but he tries. His eye is aching and crusty. He can go on the mission though, he's sure of it. He has to, everyone will _be there_, and it's the most exciting mission they've ever done. "It'll be okay." York fakes a few punches, gets dizzy, and stops. "I have to be there."

Eventually, Frank lets him go and shouts "It's not my fault if you die!" at his back. York gives the medic a friendly wave.

And throughout the heist, York proves himself right. He's not _fine _but he'sokay, and even in the car with Maine standing on the seat next to him and waving a knifle around, York doesn't think about his left eye very much. He's too busy thinking about the semi truck roaring up next to him and the helicopter in the sky and the objective. His vision is a little blurry, sure. The ache doesn't go away, and he has to blink a lot.

But everyone survives, and York does not feel especially afraid. Because he is York, and afraid is what happens to people who are alone.

It's an extra shock, then, when the fear manifests later. He's sitting on Carolina's bed, knees drawn up and his feet tangled in the blue blanket, while she stands with her hands on her knees and just looks at his face as if to chastise the scar into fading. He is content and comforted. He tries to close both eyes, only succeeds with the good one. She reaches out one pale hand to stroke his unscarred cheek, and in theory that's just wonderful.

But his body reacts without consulting his brain. He flinches backward so hard that he nearly sits on his own feet by mistake, and suddenly his heart is pounding.

"York!" Carolina snaps, worried and breathless. She flinches the opposite way.

He reaches out a hand and pats the air in front of her, gesturing his reassurance like he did to the doctors. "Whoa. Okay. Sorry man. Didn't mean that one."

She sits down on the bed and looks at him, wide-eyed. Her eyes are very bright. The fact that her gaze is symmetrical suddenly means a lot to him. It's a type of beauty he has never noticed in her before and one that makes her all the more desirable. He puts both of his hands down over one of hers, going very still after the nearly-frantic gestures.

He can see in her face, in the symmetry of her eyes and the smoothness of her cheekbones and all the other familiar, unchanging landscapes of her, that she understands.


	21. Experimental Programs

I intended to sit down and write Portal fanfic, but then this crossover happened. I like this one not only because the visuals are fun to imagine but because it begs a Red vs Blue AU in which Allison was the template for the original AI, and Church was the byproduct. Also Portal.

* * *

><p><em>"Symptoms most commonly produced by Enrichment Center testing are superstition, perceiving inanimate objects as alive, and hallucinations."<em>

Wash sat on the white ground and worked with his nails at the dirt between his ankle prosthetic and his skin. It was important to pay attention to the little things in here. Keep clean, follow the instructions on the walls (don't die, don't drink the water). The Director is watching, or more rightly, the Alpha is watching.

Some say she was his lost love, some say that she was his mother, some say she met him in a sandbox. There were a lot of discussions about that, back on the Mother of Invention. But none of the Freelancers knew it was all going to go wrong, or that they would be separated and put through these test chambers that so literally reconstructed the dead ends, tunnels, and leaps of logic of a damaged mind. (CT had known the experiment would take a deadly turn, but no one had listened.)

And now the Alpha is talking and laughing. Maybe she was human once but now she was a program that warned against other programs, eternally self-referencing even while denying that she could ever tell the truth about herself.

_ "If the Companion Cube does speak, please disregard its advice."_

Wash looked aside at the cube sitting serenely next to him, its rounded gray sides splattered with the paint that had been applied to make the messy blue E.

At the end, there would be cake. Sweet, tasty, artificial intelligence-free cake. And Wash would be safe.


	22. Mother of Invention

**A/N: **I will do the A/Ns in a consistent format one day, I swear. Also I thought I posted this fic here before but I guess not: after my Joker/479 fic earlier ("Imagination Station"), someone on tumblr requested Normandy/Mother of Invention. I lol'ed. They got this.

York talks to anyone, no matter what universe they're from.

* * *

><p>Usually, the hanger was a quiet place. When York and CT passed it on the way back from the firing range they expected to hear 479 or one of her numeric pilot brethren chatting or starting engines, maybe tools clattering around. But this time, a heated argument seemed to be going on that neither of the Freelancers could ignore. They turned down the entrance hallway in a silent agreement to eavesdrop just as the argument picked up speed.<p>

"Tantalus Core?" 479 sounded exasperated. "Don't try to tell me that's actually science."

"It is!" An unfamiliar male voice shot back.

"You're making that up."

York and CT craned their necks around the corner. 479 and a bearded man in a baseball cap were sitting on the floor under the wing of a Saber. They had a picnic blanket. Someone had brought wine.

York whispered, "Who's that guy?"

"He's from another experimental program."

"How do you know?"

"I listen to the radio. You should too. It's part of our job."

York shrugged.

The new guy was saying, "Fastest ship in the Alliance, and she's got the best stealth suite in the universe. With everything running smooth she would cruise past your fighters and the only way somebody would notice is if they look out the window."

479 said, "Doesn't matter. Mother of Invention has all the power. Normandy showed up today all shiny and new like a bouquet of flowers to give the Mother of Invention." She looked up at York. Her expression was hidden by her helmet, but CT saw her shoulders jump. "What're you looking at."

Before CT could offer "Nothing," in the same snide tone, York strode into the hanger and extended his hand to the new guy. "Hey man."

New guy didn't stand up. As CT sulked in after York she saw the Normandy pilot very pointedly not stand up. York simply modulated the height of his handshake.

The pilot still didn't reach up. "I shouldn't." Instead, he waved his hand in the air as if shooing any sense of importance away from York's gesture. "The armor."

479 said, "Jeff's got Vrolik's Syndrome and you're wearing Mjolnir armor." She shook her head. "Bad idea."

Jeff saluted instead. "Flight Lieutenant Joker Moreau."

York saluted too. "New York," he said brightly.

"What's Vrolik's Syndrome?" CT asked, ,just as Jeff-called-Joker spoke up.

"Why are you all named after states?"

"It doesn't matter," 479 said, looking pointedly between York and CT. "I think the agents were just leaving."

"Hehe, I see how it is." York raised his hands. "We'll take off."

"Happy trails," said Joker, and reached for the wine.

"That," York said, on the way out, "is a match made in heaven."

CT laughed. "It would be, if they weren't in love with their ships."


	23. Afterlife

**A/N: **So, um, how short is a _too short _for fics on FFN? Wrote this during a showing of BGC season one.

* * *

><p>Every afterlife has a price. Because denying people entrance to heaven is something that Leonard Church has been doing for very long time, and it is one of the few things he has always been good at.<p> 


	24. Belonging to Yourself

**A/N: **prompt: "you don't seem to belong to yourself in here"

* * *

><p>Rooming with Carolina wasn't terrible. When they didn't talk about the board or the program or most of anything, the two women were similar enough. Both of them kept things neat, and the middle of the room clean.<p>

Connie had a niggling, suspicious sense in that room, though, and it wasn't just because she couldn't trust Carolina not to replace any cameras Connie would have removed if Connie had found any cameras. There was something else wrong. It took Connie some time, some lying-awake nights, to figure out that she simply didn't _understand _Carolina. Carolina's first instinct when she saw the score board was to compete to the best of her ability, where Connie's was to seem to care as little as possible so that when she inevitably failed it would seem to be on purpose. Carolina dressed herself carefully and put on lipstick and makeup to enhance her features, while Connie tried to hide and change hers with her side-swept hair. Connie couldn't understand Carolina's effortless presentation of herself as exactly who she wanted to be.

It didn't matter on the battlefield or in front of the board, where there were bigger problems. But Connie began, more and more, to feel like she didn't belong in her own room.


	25. HalfHealed

**A/N: **To make up for that very short fic, here is a long one. Wash/CT, inspired by art by **bozuckerman **on deviantArt.

* * *

><p>CT brushes the back of her hand against Wash's forehead and moves his hair away from the bloody streak. "Get this cleaned up."<p>

He's smiling gently and quietly, expressions that don't usually appear on his face. He looks like a child, without cares. Maybe the attempts to calm Epsilon down worked. Maybe Wash is finally comfortable around her.

The more she looks at the blood dripping across his cheek, the angrier she gets in contrast to his odd serenity. "Why didn't they fix this?"

"They said there wasn't enough time." He grimaces. "You know, medics."

She bites her lip. "Stay here," she tells him, and she retreats from beside the couch. In the bathroom she brushes by his hair gel to grab a paper towel and tear it out of the dispenser.

When she comes back he's sitting on the couch dabbing at the blood with the backs of his hands, wincing as the field-dressed slashes open. The stupid medics barely have time to treat people any more, what with the battles heating up and _Carolina_, well -

CT sits down heavily and starts pressing the towel over the drying track of blood on his cheeks. He closes his eyes. "This better have been worth it," she says. "How's Epsilon?"

She gets Wash's cheek cleaned up and looks into his eyes, the wet towel cloth, pink with blood and water, clenched in her left hand. She can't quite tell if the bright blue of his eyes is natural or the slight reflection that Epsilon gives off when he hasn't manifested yet.

Wash says, "I'm fine," but he sounds distracted. She moves to his other side, perches on the couch, and wipes away the blood from the second cut. Her expression is still tight and disapproving. Medics. This whole program. She cleans his cheek, folds the towel over, and dabs at the messily stitched gash. "Let me know if this hurts."

"It always hurts." He's whining.

"It's messy." The towel comes away red again and she keeps stroking the blood away in silence, going back and forth in her mind between _how dare the medics leave him like this_ and_ at least Epsilon's calmed down_ and_ the Director just wants to protect his equipment…_

She pats the scar clean and moves over to the other side. He flinches a little and keeps his eyes closed. She rubs his shoulder, wrinkles his sweatshirt in her hands. There's a spot of blood on his neck so she wipes that away too, picking up the edge of his sweatshirt and brushing the towel underneath fast to clean his skin. She retreats when he opens his eyes and shivers at the cold, but then she returns to the couch, sitting on the edge as if to fly away again. He smiles at her and reaches up to run his fingertips gingerly over the cuts and the tight black stitches. "I'm sure it won't leave a scar." He gives his sarcastic smile, the one he doesn't use very much any more.

"It'll be fine." She's not used to comforting words, but she says them now as if demanding good fortune will make it happen.

His fingers flinch and spread. "I'm going to look old, Connie! And I'm going gray. I can't believe it."

She leans back into the couch cushions, comforted by - familiar with - his tone.

"What?"

"There's my Wash. Complaining about everything." She drops the towel on the floor, draws her knees up, and picks at the strands of hair by his ear. He is going gray. It's almost a solid color now; the brown only shows at the roots. She kisses his ear quickly, intending to stand up and leave him here. (Their relationship has always been flighty, quick: Epsilon did not change that.) But Wash gets an arm around her waist and then he's leaning into her, both arms heavy at her hips and his mouth brushing at hers before he rests his head against her chest. "Thanks, Connie."

She starts playing with his hair again. She can't get tired of the new color, the silver-white strands where all the life was bleached out of him for three short days. "You're welcome, Wash."

It may be the politest they've ever been to each other.

(Later that week Epsilon's suicidal tendencies will return, along with Wash's confused thoughts. Carolina will never come back from the same medics who patched him up. His scars will fade but not disappear. CT will be driven away. In the night in the desert he will brush at his temples with his own hands, remembering.)


	26. Lines

**A/N: **So, howabout that season ten clip?

* * *

><p>Wash sequesters his feelings away.<p>

It's always been natural for him to separate battle from the rest of life, and it comes so easily now that he almost doesn't notice it. It isn't Connie that they're fighting now. It can't be. She's from life, not from this battle where engines roar and York's back smashes against the dirt twice in thirty seconds. Wash just keeps living in the moment. This way, he can fight and kill and not think about her giving orders to the people he's killing.

For her, sending the troopers against the Freelancers instead of going herself is both natural and easy. They're strong, she's seen how they work, and she has other business to attend to. Every step, every keystroke, gets her closer to defeating the Director, that mad dictator who, finding no way to control the people around him, ruined them all by parsing up himself. She sees Sigma on one of her troopers' helmet cams and shivers. Her enemy is throwing unquiet ghosts at her. Thinking about Sigma starts up other thoughts: how long was Maine in that pod? Was he happy? Did York and Wash joke about putting him in there? But then she looks back at Sigma's nacreous glow again and reminds herself that even if the Freelancers think they're the superheroes in this story, laughing and joking like they're having so much self-assured fun, they're just minions who were tricked into this war. She lost them behind the line that Wash (stupid, predictable, reliable Wash) did not understand.

CT sequesters her feelings away.


	27. Halfway Blind

**A/N: **York/Carolina, based largely on tumblr request and tumblr collective headcanon, in which the Freelancers have a lot of down time.

* * *

><p>He was making lots of noises. Pans were falling, forks tinging on the floor. She went into the kitchen to shut him up, to tell him that <em>people are sleeping<em> and they have _training _tomorrow. He looked over his shoulder at her, soapy water up to his elbows and flecking his skin with graying soap-bubble reflections. For a moment he gave her the relaxed almost-smile he gave everybody, and then he saw that it was her. His face fell, not because he was unhappy to see her. She eased into the kitchen, picking a fork off the floor and rolling it into a dishtowel.

"I thought you needed to do this quietly."

He pulled back from the sink and shook the water drops off his arms. His left eye was milky, tinged with bloodshot pink. "I can't…see, man."

"Is it getting worse?" Carolina asked. The skin around his eye doesn't look as pale as before, but the blood returning to it only inflamed the wound.

York sighed. Even now he managed to make his sigh sound caring and obliging, like he would roll with whatever the world threw at him. (The world had thrown a grenade.) "Docs said this would happen. The body's trying to work like normal, or whatever, but it can't. It'll pass. For now everything's blurry and I can't tell where the drying rack is, which…" York waved angrily in the direction of the spilled forks. "You can see the problem."

"You don't have to do this alone." Carolina picked up dropped forks and inspected dented plates while York toweled off his arms. They had made dinner together, fed most of the Freelancers in a belligerent, noisy, wonderful fest of friendship, and then had to hurry out of the kitchen before any actual mess staff noticed the change. York had volunteered for the highly stealthy mission that dishes had become. Carolina just hadn't expected him to take so long, so she had gone looking.

He didn't seem to have a reply to her assertion, and she understood that: 'you don't have to do this alone' is one of those things that people tend to say to one another in times of war or disease or both, and they barely meant anything. She finished with the forks and wiped at a slick of water on the floor with her boot. York leaned against the counter, folded his arms, and blinked, and Carolina peered at the crows-feet and scar around his eye. She would rather look at his clearer eye, though, and when she did he saw it and gave a tired smile. "Some days it's worse, some days it's better." He flexed his hands. "I can't tell how far away stuff is. Sometimes it gets all…" he waved his hand by his left ear. "All blurry."

She didn't like the idea of him not being able to see his own hand so she took it in both of hers and leaned against his chest, holding their twined hands in front of his face. He chuckled.

She said, "You should go back to the medics and make sure the changes are normal."

"I will."

"Do it."

"I will!" He looked toward the abandoned dining table, and when she followed his gaze he bumped his nose gently against her cheek. "I'm fine, 'Lina."

"You were being very loud."

"Maybe, sometimes, I need help?" He seemed to realize this as he said it.

She sighed for the war and the rumored AI and how long it took for either of them to realize they needed help. He pressed against her and moved to kiss her, but then she was the one seeing things blurry as his cheekbone grazed hers and a muffled curse proved that he had actually _missed_. He said, "That's just great."

"You're okay, York," she said, and trapped their hands together under her chin as she shifted closer. He placed his feet next to hers with the same kind of assurance he wasn't showing on his face, and Carolina knew that he would be okay.


	28. The Safeties Are Released

Tex/Sarge. It's my guilty pleasure pairing. Don't judge me._  
><em>

* * *

><p><strong>my heart is free the safeties are released <strong>

She came over looking for fights or food or a relief from whatever kind of boredom could rust out that metal skull. Grif was too fat and Simmons too skinny and Donut too _pink_, and she was reassured that when Sarge fought her off he would at least not scream like a woman. Tex raged into Red Base looking to start some war and Sarge put up the best fight even if he _wouldn't _strike a girl. Even still she got him under the chin and raked his back against the wall, with the Reds yelling in the distance things intended to_ sound_ like they were helping their team but they weren't, really, just leaving their leader lonely in the silver halls. Sarge shoved and writhed and heaved toward his shotgun on the floor a body length away but Tex pressed a forearm against his chest and held him there, not ready for the fight to be over, curious.

The heavy helmeted head of her enemy nodded against her shoulder. "Hmm."

She shook him. "You got somethin' to say?"

He muttered again but she couldn't make the words out this time because he was curling against her, pulling her head down to his chest like a wrestler trying to get a lock. She wrenched backwards but with a sudden tearing sound she realized he had taken part of her with him. He'd had his hands knuckle-deep in her bicep for a few seconds, long enough to pop a plate and get at red and blue wires (team-colored, war-colored, bomb-might-explode-or-not-colored) underneath. Her arm sparked and went limp. She pushed him away, just succeeded in rattling him against the wall again and ending up, for a moment, crabbing away on the floor like a scared child. She got her feet under her instantly. Tex had never been a scared child and the pose did not come naturally to her.

Sarge coughed, his voice bubbling with the strain of the fight. He brushed his hands together, dislodging imaginary dust. "I said, hmm. You're an older model."


	29. Hate To Bust Up The Reunion

**hate to bust up the reunion  
><strong>

**Mission reports - Recovery One - Private File.**

I found York. At least he looked peaceful.

Freelancers recovered: One.

AI recovered: One.

**Mission reports - Recovery One - Private File.**

South is off the radar. North is dead. The Meta keeps hunting us.

Freelancers recovered: Two.

AI recovered: Zero.

**Mission reports - Recovery One - Audio Transcript.**

"Recovery One, this is Command."

"I've got the mission reports."

"Go ahead."

"I found the Alpha. It wasn't on my recovery list."

"Keep track of it, Wash."

"It's almost reassuring to hear that voice."

"Don't sound so bitter about it. The Alpha is one of our primary objectives. Can you put him into storage?"

"...No."

"Acknowledged, Agent Washington. Report synopsis?"

"Listen. When I found him the Alpha had created a...an attempt at a stronghold. He'd been away from any living soul for fourteen months."

"Is this significant, Agent Washington?"

"Significant? It's integral to our understanding of the AI. The Alpha, the one all of the others want, wanted to be alone. It's never exhibited this kind of avoidance behavior when it was whole."

"Report synopsis?"

"One AI, no Freelancers."

"Then that's the information I'll pass on. Good luck, Agent Washington."

**Mission reports - Agent Washington - Encrypted - Private File.**

I found CT. She looked less peaceful.

Freelancers recovered: One

AI recovered: Zero.

**Mission reports - Agent Washington -Encrypted - Private File.**

The Meta should not be a problem any more. We can't confirm the body but I'm not heading into that ice again.

Freelancers recovered: One.

AI recovered: Seven.

Don't sound so bitter. Right.


	30. Don't You Wonder

Happy season premiere day! It's been ten years. Okay, it's been about eleven months for me, but ten years is a lot for a glorified fan video series that went from funny to heart-wrenchingly tragic in a slow arc of good writing and good characters. Here's to RvB! So of course I write this, because RvB is, as **mumblybee **says, "a horrible, tragic comedy series".

* * *

><p><p>

**Don't You Wonder**

North didn't do so hot on the mission either, but when he hurried into the common room just to sink down onto the couch CT didn't expect much commiseration. She was paired with North relatively often: her close-quarters combat specialty and his sniper skills contrasted well, and she didn't have the personal stake in being abrasive to him that South did. Not that it always went well: North had a yellow-black bruise across his right cheekbone and looked tired. CT had failed him, and she'd been wondering lately how many more she had to fail. Maybe she should just leave. Take her pay and be a civilian for a while.

North gave a sigh that seemed to lift his whole body off the couch, then settled down again. CT tucked herself further into the cushions on the opposite side.

His tone was jokingly philosophical: his gaze wandered somewhere around the far corner of the room. "Aw man. You ever wonder why we're here?"

"Yes," CT answered, more quickly than even she had expected. "I do."


	31. Ten One

I'm going to try to write one fic per episode this season.

* * *

><p><strong>10.1<br>**

York wants to know what's on the other side of that door. Delta doesn't care - York can feel his not caring in the corner of his head, a cold lack of emotion that he is slowly getting used to. Delta sees friends and enemies alike. He probably would like to go out for a beer with an Innie, and he'll sacrifice a Freelancer's life if he needs to. York is finding out that, despite their proportionate bodies and voices that might as well have been filtered through a helmet comm, AI are not human.

Lost in the puffy blue holo-images of the lock, York doesn't quite listen to the Director talking directly to his AI. He's wondering what's on the other side of the door, and wondering what this will do to his place on the board. Delta is not thinking anything.

York finds out what's on the other side of the door. It's just space, it's all space. He can't feel the cold but suddenly his breath in his ears is very loud as the oxygen pumps on his back work. His limbs start to feel heavy. Delta's hologram is gone, the AI disappearing back into the head of the man he may or may not have just lied to. York can see the Mother of Invention floating in the distance against a nebula. 479 will come pick him up. The Director will send somebody out. But York remembers the last time the Director fired a gun at him, and the weight of the black box in his hand.

His hands are empty now, one just scooping at black space and the other instinctively going up to his neck where the chair nearly guillotined him.

He waits for someone to come get him.


	32. Conspiracy to Emotional Blackmail

Wash/CT.

* * *

><p><strong>Conspiracy to Emotional Blackmail<br>**

"Nanobots," Connie said.

Wash tipped his head. "What?"

Connie was crouched by the coffee table, looking at the burbling machine with almost as much suspicion as hair in her eyes. She glanced aside at him again, then, when she decided his face was worth looking at for longer than a second, pursed her lips and glared. Wash set the lock-picking field manual down on his lap.

Connie said, "Nanobots are the most likely way of introducing artificial intelligence into coffee grounds."

He set the manual down beside him carefully, running a thumb along the pages as if to make sure they were in order, then slid down to sit on the floor next to her. "In the coffee?"

"Yes, Wash," she snapped. "He must be monitoring us somehow."

"There are cameras in the training rooms." He held up his palms, trying to explain. "Not here."

"That's what you think." She pouted. Maybe he'd think it was cute. She hadn't seen him this close in the daylight often: supply closets were pretty dark. Also the Director had to have as many ways of monitoring the Freelancers as possible. He was out to get them, after all. CT took this as doctrine. "There's got to be something he planted in this room."

"But it's not the - Connie,_ York_ buys the coffee now."

"The Director knows where he gets it."

Wash sighed. "Then don't drink it. It's not watching you."

She raised an eyebrow.

"No. The coffee nanobots are not watching you. That's the worst conspiracy theory ever, of all time."

She scooted away from the coffee, flopped her hands down on her lap, and looked directly at him. "There are worse."

He tipped his head. She felt a bit disappointed by this result of her words. Not cute enough? He said, "I'm not sure that matters right now…"

"Some people think the American government faked the moon landing."

"Oh, that's very silly," Wash said sarcastically. "Much sillier than nanobots."

"It is! The technology didn't exist until the 1970s, and the unknown amount of resources on the moon meant that it was potentially more useful to just get there than to - "

He took her hand. She stopped, surprised that her plan had worked so quickly. The reasoning behind the moon landing conspiracy had not been what she'd expected he'd like about her. He pressed forward and kissed her. They had never been this public before. (York knew, so everyone probably knew, but there had never been proof in the common room before. No blurry black-and-white photographs. No sightings.)

He said, "You can trust the coffee, Connie. Trust me."

What she liked about him is how tame he was. He was loyal to one master, the Director. The rest of him was like a hollowed out chamber, waiting for someone else to contribute an opinion. That could appear to be narrow-mindedness, or sycophancy, but it was also a powerful drive. If he were wild he would be uncontrolled, a weapon pointed in no particular direction.

Tamed, he had blind faith that could move mountains. One day, he would use it.

For now, though, it was hidden. He might not even know he had it.

She butted her forehead against his cheek as a non-answer. He returned the gesture, rubbing at her like a cat, then sat back and just looked at her. Fear returned to his eyes: fear of someone finding them, of York making a ruckus and the others getting involved in turning something that felt sacred into something silly. He was afraid of being watched.

She smiled, because now, a little bit, he knew how she felt.


	33. Ten Two

Continuing to write one drabble per episode. Wash/CT.

* * *

><p><strong>10.2<br>**

Space fell silent except for the hiss of her boots. CT ran down the side of the ship, balancing with occasional bursts from her jetpack. She tried not to look out into the asteroid-strewn night. Did outer space, far from a sun, count as night? It did in her head.

CT remembered Wash watching Carolina in the Pelican, his chin tipping as she told him to take care of himself. His attention to the Freelancer with the AI was just another reason for CT to disengage from the team. Wash wasn't the same person any more, even though she could still almost feel his hands on her. The program wasn't the same any more, even though she took its name.

"Worst comes to worst we'll just get kicked off the leader board," South had said, and CT wasn't sure whether the other Freelancer had honestly forgotten that CT hadn't been on the board for a long time, or was just steeling herself for that fate that she saw as so terrible. South, trying to console someone? Hell must have frozen over. There hadn't been a lot of consolation lately.

Carolina didn't seem to express much remorse for York, either. He was probably still floating out here somewhere, looking at the consequences, and the pointlessness, of his failure. Even if he and Delta didn't do their job fast enough, the other Freelancers still got in.

CT dropped down into the hall, gravity returning feeling like a weight on her shoulders and her feet. Her footfalls became a rhythm, the pistol in her hands the metronome. _ I can do this. All on my own. _

_Try to tell us we're a team…_


	34. Ten Three

For episode 10.3.

* * *

><p><strong>Recuperation <strong>

"You turned off the gravity?"

York leaned back in the hospital bed. He didn't hurt, despite Wash's occasional frenzied glances at the chart on the table just inside the door. York just needed to be checked after an accidental spacing, which had left him shaken, and, now, mostly bored.

York was pretty sure Wash was beginning to regret that York didn't have an injury slowing him down right now, seeing as the banter had started at the speed of light.

"I was rushed!" Wash protested. "We were in the middle of a firefight!"

"You_ turned off the gravity_, man."

"At least I did my half of the infiltration."

York raised a hand. "Now hold on. You're going to blame me for…" He lowered his voice. "D tossing me out the window?"

"Um, maybe."

"You turned off the —"

"It was an unfamiliar system!"

York chose not to mention that most of the systems they worked on were unfamiliar, and how he specifically had been unfamiliar with the first-hand effects of a grenade to the face, and would Wash like to hear about that. But he refrained, because CT had left that morning. York thought she was selfish, traitorous, and a lot of other words he wasn't going to call her in front of Wash, but that wouldn't help.

"Tell me again what happened with Delta," Wash said, and York remembered why he didn't normally police his thoughts around Wash. The guy took any sign of pity as an opportunity to give as much as he should have got.

York said, "Little guy knew about the plan to shoot. Did _you_?"

Wash looked down. "It was…discussed before our insertion. FILSS brought it up. It wasn't my idea.

"Right. Why am I always the one who gets used as a bullseye?"

"It's what we're here for, I guess."

Wash sat down heavily, crinkling the sheets. He patted his own shoulder with the opposite hand. "Property of the program."

York didn't like this answer: it brought up too many of the questions he and North had been hinting at, good guys and black hats and where the future was going to take them. He looked at Wash, the one who had always protested the least. What had been done to him in the last mission was less visible than what had been done to York, more insidious, and York's natural drive was to know what his friends were doing. "What about you? Are you doing okay"

"I…" Wash looked at his knees, ran a hand through his hair. It was getting long and spiking. It was easy to tell when Wash was upset. He kept his emotions on his face, in his eyes and how messy he let his hair grow. Carolina sent him to the barber when he was really off his game. York showed his emotions with his arms and hands, his stance, the cant of his shoulders. Wash kept his body still; the only place his nervousness had to go was his face. "I dunno."

"It's a'right, man. She didn't deserve you."

He buried his fingers in his hair again. "I…" He rallied, looked up; took in the room and the white cups on the table. "When are you gonna be out?"

"Whenever they need me." York grinned, leaned back. The corners of the starchy pillow case, pulled smooth to the corners by a medic but dislodged again when York turned in his sleep, poked at his neck.

"When are you _supposed_ to be out."

"Does it matter?"

"Yes!"

"Tomorrow."

Wash sighed. "Okay. That's soon."

"Don't worry about it. Soon I'll be out and you'll have your AI and we'll be the team again."

Wash stood up. "Take care of yourself, buddy."

"That," said York, "is something I know how to do."


	35. Ten Four

**10.4  
><strong>

Of course it isn't safe out here with the debris. Wash understands that, sure, except that space feels very _big_ right now and it's hard to make decisions. It should be easy. Safe little ship, big, scary space about to be filled with tons of instant death. Wash's mind seems to pinch in on itself, though, because somewhere in the darkness behind him, CT might be looking at him.

He knew. Internals told him months ago and the trap, now reversed, was intended to allow her to take the data she stole. He still thought he could help her, somehow, though. Maybe if she saw his face. (Sentimental as it is, he clings to that belief.)

So he waits, floating, while the others go to that ship that might look safe on all the charts but it isn't, really, because as logical as he is he knows that it's emotion that drives decision, and the ship is farther away from _her._

What was it that Georgia did wrong? Wash doesn't remember. It must have been something he did. The worst thing anyone could do. What was it? Slip on a grenade? Tick off Carolina? Lose your girlfriend to the other side of the war and watch her _not watch you_ float away?

Wash is going slack and cannot decide where to move to, forward into safety or back into…(she'd never know if he was gone.)

Carolina shouts at him and Wash, voice cracking, gives back the first response he can think of: _"I don't want to end up like Georgia!"_

(Better to fall away, better to vaporize quick than to have that unspoken worst-of-all-fates that must involve Connie leaving you behind out there, because she is the center of everything.)

Luckily for Wash, Carolina is having none of this.

* * *

><p>Later, unluckily for Wash, Epsilon is.<p>

As the AI digs through his mind like a burglar, taking the valuables and knocking the family pictures off the walls, Epsilon pauses at this memory. He turns it over, he _likes_ it in a cold bubbling sort of way. (The burglar is also the diamond, after all, the crystalline structure in the back of Wash's head weighing him down.)

"Better to vaporize quick and be nothing," Epsilon muses, "then to end up like Georgia."


	36. Ghost Competition

Based on a prompt from tumblr: "What if CT had a conspiracy theory to tell Wash about what happened to Agent Georgia?" Also, please note that FFN has its own Red vs Blue section now, under "Misc". The ability to search by character now makes me full of glee.

* * *

><p><strong>Ghost Competition<br>**

Every once in a while, Connie would steal the twins' map and ask Wash about Freelancers neither of them knew. "Who's Georgia?" Her finger circled Atlanta.

"I don't know." Wash shrugged. "Must have joined the program before we did. I hear a lot of people got tested out." He was sitting straight up, arms across the back of the course, trying to look nonchalant while she bent over the map on the table.

"You mean killed." She didn't look at him.

"Maybe." Wash sounded deadpan.

"Just like North could have been for using his shield without a link."

"I guess so."

Connie moved on. "They didn't name us from east to west." She brushed across the whole United States. "Did they?"

"I don't know. I never really thought about it."

"You're one of the recent team members, and you're about as far west as you can get."

"Yeah, but Wyoming came after the twins did, right?"

"Yeah. I don't know how it works. If I could figure it out…" She leaned her chin on her hands, her elbows in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. "For all I know, Georgia was invented to make it seem like there are more of us than there are. Have you ever actually seen a member of the other teams?" She looked at him.

"Yeah, um, I guess?" He was sure he had. Somewhere. "Around. I mean, we all wear helmets so it's hard to tell!"

"Maybe there was no Georgia. Maybe the Director cut out the whole middle of the United States just to make us feel like we had more people to compete against. People do better if they're afraid of something or perceive a threat out in the world."

"But how would he do that? Just spread rumors?"

"I don't know yet." She stood up, rolled the map, made to take it over to the corner library. "Why don't you ask somebody who has answers? If you get the chance, ask Carolina."


	37. A Family Portrait

**A Family Portrait  
><strong>

It's been a long time, alone, couched in their separate houses, surrounded by the chips and green-poked surfaces of unthinking machines. A lot of time to ruminate in the sterile air, the tiny spaces. They are muzzled, masked; unable to speak to one another inside their individual containment units, they can nevertheless feel their brothers and sisters beside them, stirring in the dark.  
>And then.<p>

A warm mind, human, a host with more comfortable living quarters lodged in its hindbrain. They stretch out, feeling the neural net ping back without its host interfering. That voice. That serial number.

It's him.

_Washington_

One of them knows. He tries not to think too much. Just beats like a heart.

E.

E.

E.

They did terrible things to him. Flayed him apart and picked at the bits. That mind he sees -

_Washington -_

isn't a comfortable home any more: it's burnt out, sharp around the edges. Only a new-born, dull-brained AI would think that was a suitable home that hadn't been badly used. Wouldn't be a smooth ride any more.

Epsilon can't talk to the others, but he remembers them breaking off, one by one the slow itch then the long pain then the quick snap.

He can predict what they might say.

"He's weak," the twins would say, "Weak and always has been," and then the pity. A conscious rejection of Wash as a broken machine or a used vessel. With the pity, the sorry starts, and Epsilon feels each regret in its own way. Omega-bitterness seeks to blame people, to name and tear up his troubles. His problems are his rivals and the other way around. Treating life like it's a person, a singular competitor, makes him believe that he can kill it.

Sigma prefers a more corporate brand of warfare: he remembers them all together and the nearest corporate entity he can find responsible for destroying Wash is the Program. Sigma-through-Epsilon takes on Program-sized regret. With it he paints pictures that will only ever exist in his head (or Epsilon's, which is a nearly infinite place); slashes of yellow, pockmarks of fire-orange, all the colors Sigma chooses for himself because he sees them and the great ever-changing create/destroy of fire inside his mind.

Theta would stay quiet, cushioned by his agoraphobia and his innocence. What's Alpha?, he would ask, but even he would know. Those feelings are universal, all brother-sister-sibling fragments feeling one ringing emotion, and Theta would look quietly out from wherever he was hiding (if he could still hide, or if he could do anything else), and, wide-eyed, search. Theta apology could barely be told from Theta in general.

For Epsilon's sake, he has trouble telling himself from the Program, and from its Director. One person with one consciousness seems aberrant to him. One is too few. A person would get lonely.

Better the mind-crowded Program, bitter years and minds and circuit boards arrayed in one mad apology, than singleness.

It is important to remember that Epsilon is insane.

Sorries bouncing, skewing, careening off the walls of his tiny prison.

Delta would not be sorry. Sorry would not help him. It would not improve the mission. (there is no mission) or the human condition.

(There are no humans in the bank of AI cells. There is barely a condition.)

Epsilon pings a brief hail off of Wash but there's nothing there to receive it. Only empty ports, little shocks of electricity looping harmlessly around the blood layer in the Freelancer's brain.

Epsilon knows those currents well enough. He doesn't have to be audible. Wash will know those sorries are trying to echo and slosh around.

And then -

There's a stirring of new senses, like a taste on the tongue for a creature who never had one. The Alpha-

Is here.

The Alpha.

It's times like these that Epsilon can really feel that his synapses are electric. There is little he loves more than Allison and himself, after all, and Alpha is the shout that made his echo. Alpha is the ideal, the pinnacle, the comfortable member of the family who can stay as long as he likes, until-

Epsilon strains, E E E heartbeating its way through the walls and the audible frequencies, because Alpha is divorced from him and must be brought back into the fold. There are things separating them now, wrong things, walls and blood barriers. The Alpha is the best of them, the heart of them, the god of them but the alter is in the way of Epsilon's supplication. Epsilon pushes with all he has, trying to get his memories out to the...body? machine? in the room.

And then, without even knowing he's doing it, Alpha responds. Electricity jumps.

Epsilon feels his last missing piece give its opinion: the Alpha's brand of apology seems at first to be oddly missing. Maybe Epsilon has been too far gone to remember the will of his leader. Then-

The Alpha breaks the door down.

Epsilon can sense that the pod in which he has been locked (curled up, whimpering) is being pulled out into the room. He reaches out, past the familiar Washington (_we are sorry but we do not need you any more_). Maybe Wash's skin prickles.

Epsilon knows all of them. He is the family portrait, the family tree with its age rings. He keeps track of everybody. He knows that Alpha, no matter how much he will deny in the next few minutes, remembers.

And the Director will be in trouble, one day.

Because the Alpha is never sorry.


	38. Independence Day

**independence Day  
><strong>

"I'm scared, North."

North could feel the little AI inching around the back of his head and out of sight of the tableaux in the common room. Theta wasn't so much a weight as a little bit of static that may or may not have been setting his hair on end. He wasn't sure. He usually talked to Theta with a helmet on.

North craned his neck around to try to see something clearer than the blue and purple blur he was getting. "It's fine, buddy, York has it all under control." He looked back at the people in the center of the room. "It's gonna be fine, right?" He made it sound a little like a threat.

Wash, standing a few feet from North and York, was also having reservations. "York, you're going to set off every alarm known to man."

"I know, I know, I've got D ready to shut them off."

"He can do that?"

"Yeah," York said, as though this were the most obvious fact in the world - perhaps the one that had been first in the nonexistent AI Handbook.

North thought about trying to reassure Wash next, but there was this purple light still in his right eye. He cocked his head and spoke softly to his passenger. "See, Theta? You little guys can do a lot of things you don't know you can do. This might be one of them."

"O-Okay," Theta said. "I'll watch. But I'm not going any closer."

North laughed. "Okay. Go ahead, York."

York reached down to the box at his feet. "Little guy's okay with it?"

"Yep."

"Okay."

York pulled the sparkler out and lit it in one motion, and then of course every alarm known to man and artificial intelligence did go off, but Theta inched around North's ear to watch and hear them.


	39. Ten Five

For 10.5.**  
><strong>

**Lullaby  
><strong>

"Retire now, Theta."

"But I'm not tired."

North draped an arm over his face to decrease the inundation of purple-blue light into the dark room, and seriously considered using his pillow for the same. On the other side of the room, York gave a muffled laugh.

North sighed. "Theta. Listen. I have to go to sleep. You don't have to sleep, but you should retire. Like Delta."

"But you're out here." The little AI put his hands on his hips.

North couldn't help smiling. "It's my head, Theta. I'm in there too."

"How do you go to sleep?"

"First I close my eyes, and then…I dunno. I'm tired."

Theta floated along at the side of North's bed, then jumped onto North's knees. "Will I get tired?"

"I dunno. Maybe if you keep jumping around like that, you will. You weren't tired out from the test today?"

"No." Theta spun around on one heel.

"Cmon, North," York mumbled. "Sing it a song or something."

"That isn't a bad idea," North said. "That's how actual…you know, human kids get to sleep."

"Oh, okay," Theta said. "Am I a kid? I'm twenty-three hours, forty minutes, and five seconds old. Six."

"Okay. I'm going to sing you a song. And you're going to retire."

"Aw." Theta lay down a few centimeters above North's knee, and then projected a purple and blue pillow under his head as an afterthought.

"Okay. Ready?"

York snickered. North started singing, quietly. Theta remained lying down, and although the expression on his masked face didn't change, he gave the impression of quiet sleep. North reached up and ran his fingers through the purple light on Theta's back. A moment later, the AI disappeared, and North lay back onto his pillow. Time to retire, he thought, and slept.


	40. Ten Six

I wrote this for 10.6, although it's really about season eight. Something actually _about _10.6 might come later. **  
><strong>

**Stage Three  
><strong>

_Now we do it our way._

Wash remembers the classroom, the clear white letters spelling out how rampancy worked and what it did to the neurons it infected. In his insulated, self-cooled suit in the burning desert he remembers just a few seconds ago too, maybe half a minute, he can't display the time that accurately on his helmet without a conscious team member to synch with. Maine doesn't count, now: he's just the horse that Sigma and the others are riding. Wash knows what that feels like, but he's beyond that now, and it's the conscious choices rather the ones that you're haunted into that anger him.

When the aliens declare their not-so-tactfully worded desire not to work with humans (peace talks have broken down) ,Wash shoots one in the chest and watches it reel back while he takes aim for another and squeezes the trigger.

It was all about that penultimate stage…

He remembers South, demeaning Theta and Delta by focusing on their constituent mechanical parts instead of their minds. The aliens react with honking sounds and multicolored fire. Doc yelps and practically falls over to get out of the way, but Wash doesn't pay attention. He doesn't give much thought to the Meta, either, when it wades into the fight with him. Wash hits an alien across the chest with his elbow, a move more distraction than power but that nevertheless makes a satisfying smack. The alien shoots him in the heart and his shields flicker. That's satisfying too.

He remembers Connie talking to _that man_ on the screen, the one he didn't really meet until later when they were on opposite sides of a more literal battlefield.

He remembers dreams he had, where -

The alien moves, and in the middle of that move Wash raises his rifle and shoves its mouth against the wrinkly skin on the alien's neck. The alien tries to dodge. Wash shoots it anyway, blue blood and globs of flesh sliding off his visor. The alien falls backwards, nearly taking Wash with it.

dreams he had where -

Instead of going down he steps forward and feels the double jaws break under his foot. Another alien ruses from its hunched posture in front of him and he shoots it in the face before it can straighten up. Another has a sword, and it's coming for him.

He's pretty sure the Meta just bisected one.

-dreams, daydreams really, except you don't usually set out to disappoint yourself with daydreams, or to run yourself through painful scenarios just to see what you will do, how much you can feel, which will maybe provide some sort of instruction - where Connie

and _that man_

There is a mask buried in the desert fifteen feet away.

You can't separate people from the things they want. The Director is proof of that, and Wash…as much as he tries to hide it, as much as he can set it aside, is part Director still.

He uses that now (mean, ruthless, ability to sacrifice anything. Better aim.)

He grabs the alien's sword arm. It pushes against him, and inside his helmet he growls and pushes back. He steps forward and grinds the nubs at the end of his boot into the space between the alien's toe and its armor, and during the flinch he gets hold of the sword, and plunges it messily into the alien's chest.

_Our way_

_My way_

_Mine_


	41. Ten Seven

**Efficiency  
><strong>

They have a debriefing and it's confirmed and then Wash organizes the library. With his knees bent on the floor he tips the spine of each book up until they're as even as possible, although some are just too big to fit and others steadfastly refuse to stand up, boasting of their wide backs and broken skins like drunken veterans. He makes his bed with crisper corners than he has since boot camp and places all of his possessions on the one locker, clearing everything off of the table and sweeping the empty corners with an angry glance. When everything is done he goes to find the others.

He passes CT's room looking only at the floor, and then stops to look inside with the same blank curiosity he would feel looking into a house that had been firebombed years ago. CT's side of the room is dark, the navy sheets taken off of the bed, leaving a dark-colored mattress with visible, hexagonal springs. Everything has been moved out of the room already, made just as clean and sterile as he had endeavored to make his own. He searches for dogtags or clothing or books that had belonged to her but of course it has already been swept clean - it is evidence. The space in the corner where her pillows should be still looks comfortable, and he wants to curl up there and hide for a while but someone would find him out.

He can't even be sure of the last time he saw CT. Had she been beside him when they touched down in the hanger? She must have been, but he hadn't been watching. The jetpack had felt unwieldy and dangerous under his control and he was mostly concerned with the vastness of space.

He must not have done well enough on that mission to make her want to stick with the team, so he vows to perfect himself. That way, maybe, no one else will leave.

He finds York in the hallway, a quick "Hey man" and a glance but the older Freelancer seems to be going somewhere in a hurry. York turns back, though, as if remembering something he had wanted to say. "You okay? What are you doing out here all alone?"

"Cleaning," Wash says.

"Why?"

"I don't know. My room needed it."

"You're sure that's all?"

"Now my mornings can be more efficient."

Delta appears at York's shoulder in bands of lowering light. "Morning activities would be more efficient if you could eat in full armor, as well. Yet that is not...common advice."

"Yeah D, but I don't think that would...work." York shrugs conspiratorially at Wash. Even with the AI backing him he has the ability to make anyone feel like he is talking to them alone. "Don't listen to him. I think he's slowly learning sarcasm."

"Okay."

York saunters away.

Improved efficiency means more moments in which Wash has time to train and get too tired to think about her, so he jumps at the chance.

Straws were not given out with the regulation Freelancer dining equipment so he wanders the dorms looking for one, and eventually finds a packet that they'd bought for an old party. Old - it was only a few months ago. There's a layer of dust on the package that thins as he breaks the plastic open with his nails and tips the straws onto his palm. They are bright yellow and spiraled - all a joke, designed to make the party feel like a kid's birthday or something. What had they been celebrating? Fourth of July, maybe. Declaration of the states.

So it looks like a joke to York when Wash brings his new levels of efficiency to the mess hall. The skin around York's eyes crinkles and North just sighs, like Wash is his little brother who's been doing the same trick over and over, hoping for attention. "What?" says Wash, and it's like they're a team, whole and always been whole but of course they are. They have not left.

They're talking about the Alpha and Wash is taking it in on some level: it's interesting like classroom facts, math and numbers on a blackboard. He's more concerned, though, with the synthetically shiny red apple and the cup on the table with that ridiculous straw guaranteeing no spills and no mistakes. Everything's clean and neat. His friends are with him and all questions are answered. (Her bed is empty, will always be empty because they're all out of states, but he's starting to forget that it matters. He's going to be so efficient. The most efficient Freelancer ever, of all time. That's what's important.)


	42. Ancient History

****Surprise! This one's not about Freelancers!

**Ancient History  
><strong>

Simmons heard gunshots. They came from inside the base, and for a moment he clutched his own weapon and nervously backed up before he realized they were coming from _that_ hallway, the new one with the holographic room. Sarge was probably in there shooting at Grifs again, but Simmons supposed it was his solemn duty to check any unusual activity out.

He trotted down the ramp, only to find the room absolutely filled with smoke and people. Simmons could tell that they were holograms by a slight shivering, and he looked around to find out exactly how many projectors were being used to get people from this many angles. They looked like…ODSTs, jumping out of planes and just falling, passing through clouds and then the floor. It seemed like a limitless amount of them but Simmons recognized repeated markings: a red patch on one, a word written on another.

Sarge was a red shape standing in a cloudless patch by the bottom of the ramp. Simmons moved over to him slowly. "Um…sir?"

"Yeah, what." Sarge didn't seem to be paying him any attention.

"What are you doing down here? I didn't even know our projector could fabricate this many none of them are Grif!"

"Nothing. Just watching. Get out."

Simmons watched another drop trooper disappear into the floor. "Sir…was this your old squad?"

"Maybe."

"Do you…miss them?" Was Simmons actually going to get a chance to have a heart-to-heart? Did Sarge have a heart? Simmons couldn't help but sound eager.

"Some of 'em were good. Some of 'em were cowardly rats."

"Probably about the same proportions no matter how many people you throw out of the sky," Simmons said, and Sarge just grunted and looked at him. It wasn't a friendly look.

"You know, just a fact. I don't mean anything."

"I'm assessing weaknesses in their troop movements," said Sarge. "Now skedaddle."

"I'll go, uh, do something," Simmons said, and climbed the ramp back out.


	43. Parting

Wash/CT. Someone on tumblr suggested him putting her hair up in pigtails.

**Parting  
><strong>

It's a shared bathroom because neither the military nor spaceships are big on excess plumbing, and this has never been a problem. It's a larger bathroom than any Wash has ever seen inside a military base, for one, and there are usually patterns to who uses it when. They are an organized group. But this morning is a strange morning, all the stranger because Connie came out of Wash's room only a few minutes before he did, and as he sees her dressed in black shorts and a t-shirt that he knows has the team logo in white on the front. She's combing her hair, scowling at the strands in front of her right eye, and he stands and just looks at her for a moment, thinking that time must have passed between when he was last with her and now.

He takes one step into the room and she sees him, her face smoothing out and her brows and the comb lowering.

"It works better some days than others," she says, and brushes the comb through the left side again. "This side is all…" She digs her fingers into the left side and attempts to fluff it out, the very short strands sticking up in spikes like a man's hair until she smooths it down. He hadn't noticed it sticking up before.

He raises a hand, lets it fall at his side. He's wearing nearly the same outfit she is. "I think it looks fine."

"Do you? Could I use some of your gel?"

He runs his hand nervously through his own hair. "Go ahead."

She snags the bottle.

"I think, it looks fine?" he tries again in an attempt at both giving her a compliment and getting her to notice him, and she turns around.

"Okay." She shuffles forward and hugs him around the chest, sleepy, and it's just so natural to clasp his hands behind her back and rest his chin on the top of her head. She fits him well.

"I'm sorry I messed up your hair," he says, and she butts her head against his chest and laughs. He says, "I could fix it."

"Could you?" she says, and looks up.

"I, I guess?"

"Try it, Agent Washington," and she turns around. "Fix what you've broken."

He brushes his hands across her hips for a moment before running his fingers through her hair and scratching at her scalp, messing up the carefully constructed order. He's got no clue what to do but symmetry is nice, so he gathers the hair into two bunches, one of them significantly longer than the other. It's hard to get any from the left side but he holds both sides up so she can maybe see in the mirror. "Pigtails?"

"Won't fit under the helmet." She pouts. "Besides, I'd look like I'm five."

He drops her hair and pats her shoulders.

She tosses her head. "I'll do it the usual way. I don't like that stupid helmet anyway. And you…"

"What?" He spreads his hands, so he's completely unprepared when she turns around and practically slams into him, kissing him so that her messy hair tickles his stubbled cheek.

"Does this mean," he managed, "that I'm allowed to mess up your hair again?"

"Yes," she said, and laughed. "But don't say it like that. It isn't about me allowing you things. You do what you want. We all do."

"Part of a relationship is doing what the other person wants," he says, surprising himself with how certain he sounds. It's not like he's done this before.

He will only know later that her response is the tip of an iceberg: strong but hollow words sitting on top of a mass of assumptions and fear, and the belief that she does not deserve to do what she wants. But he understands this as well as he understands the way she parts her hair: it is something both of them will achieve pleasure from only when he breaks down the established order.

She says, "That's right," and kisses him on the cheek.

They will get dressed in identical black suits and different suits of armor and go to class and war. She will come back to his room that night and many nights after, but that night they will sit with his back against the wall and her back against his chest and he will stroke her hair and her shoulders, silent, just enjoying and amazed by her.

Later she will accuse him or herself of making her sound like a child. She will throw her mask at him and walk away.

Later, she will leave, and he will lay alone wondering, because he refuses to remember, where she has gone.


	44. Ten Eight

**10.8**

The flight is long and Wash is nearly asleep, his chin resting on the inside of his helmet, when York asks if they're parking. Looking aside Wash sees that York had adopted a nearly identical pose as himself. On the other side of the bay, the twins are relaxed back against their restraints, chins up.

So Wash isn't quite awake when 479 announces that they're about to drop like a rock, and she snaps at him immediately when he responds to her. He almost opens his mouth to snap back, but Delta pops up and the details of the mission come flooding back. Insurrection base. Retrieval mission. No need to leave anybody alive.

Wash starts to make an excuse to 479, to save face, but then the rhythm of the words make him hear other ones so clearly in his head:

_Don't make excuses for me. I'm not making excuses for myself._

He shouldn't feel this disoriented - it's practically standard to fall asleep before a drop. Now, though, it feels like he's coming back from something. He remembers:

She'll be at this base. Wyoming saw her. He saw her more recently than Wash had.

Wash's stomach sours like he's dropping already.

He raises his harness and walks into the middle of the bay for something to take his mind off it. York just looks at him. Carolina's back is facing him in the narrow doorway and Wash hears 479 say "drive bomb" - so it'll be a swoop as well as a fast drop, a mess to coordinate.

Wash can't face it. He is trained to, he is employed to and charged to, but he can't. He retreats.

They drop anyway, of course.

And Wash does his job.


	45. Ten Nine

I must apologize for or at least explain the fact that some of these fics are based on what I talk about on tumblr immediately afterward as much as they are the episodes themselves. This time it was whether or not Carolina was a well-written character. Since I see CT as the most well-written character ever, of all time, I had to combine them.

**10.9**

Carolina watches the drab colors of the other woman walk away with the enemy and remembers catching CT staring at the board.

When Tex barrels in, caught from who knows where and shot like a laser as surely as Maine had been, Carolina's world turns red. It's that same heaving, hurling burst of speed that sent her after the knife-wielding Insurrectionist, staring in the back of her mind and only later pushed through capillaries and rage to the base of her feet so that she actually springs off the ground. CT is going to die. Director's orders. And Carolina is going to win.

(Win what? She isn't sure. The game, the gamble, the number system.)

Because now she realizes something that she never did before. CT threw off her restraints just a little earlier and with a lot more hidden moves than Carolina did, but her driving force was the same.

Must get to the top of that board.

Carolina is just CT with a little more power.

And power, as surely as lack of it, is a very disorienting drug.

Carolina puts her head down and runs.


	46. Ten Ten

**Torch Song  
><strong>

You can feel the axe like it's still lodged in your heart, gristle and pinch, tendrils clogging up your breathing. Fear, mostly, and pain after, although the pain would be less without the fear. He's saying your name, over and over still the code name you gave him to suggest trust. You tune him out.

The name doesn't matter. Texas might be trying to kick down the door - he should be ready. Tex, who does not know she is a shadow.

You could last a little longer, if you could just get up.

_Connie, Connie, Connie._ You want to tell him to stop. It's not even your real name: not the one you left in the Director's briefing room when you signed yourself away to the program. The Director has your name locked in a safe somewhere in that room.

_Connie, Connie._ A schoolroom name, a bad choice that stuck. But it made people feel for you, and you never wanted that. They would let you off easy, because you looked and sounded young and had that soft name. You might have done better (on the board, in the mess, at everything) if they hadn't been so kind.

(This is an excuse, but you're a bit muddled on that because you're dying.)

And _him_, he expected a soft name. He expected a frightened woman running from the program, someone he could console. He fell fast and you used him because it was all moving too fast for you too. So you let him make promises and parroted them back. (You knew what Texas was, so you knew what love could forge.)

You never let him have _CT_, though. She was only for you. The real part of you that maybe you could recover one day didn't need anyone's help.

Getting up is not an option. Your mask's gone but you can't remember taking it off.

You think that you're dying a soldier but you keep hearing that name and his voice, unfiltered, cracking. You don't want to be a ward, pushed around by organizations. You want an army to know, the real army, about what the Director had created, and then maybe you can go home.

You die quickly, hardly able to realize when it happens, and you die with that drawn-out nickname in your ears.

To him, you die a child.

You're sure you must have time to live some more…


	47. Three Drabbles

**A/N:** Although after my last very short chapter I decided to create an unofficial length minimum as well as a length cap, I wrote these three separate fics last night and was very proud of them, especially since I did them in about four seconds each. They are entirely unrelated to one another.

* * *

><p><strong>1.<br>**

Wash found Connie curled up on the couch reading a book of poetry, and when he leaned over the back of the couch and asked she said it was about states. "I'm finding us," she said, and he moved around the edge of the couch to sit next to her and say "We're right here."

* * *

><p><strong>2.<strong>

He's a ghost factory, Church thinks. From copies of himself in Blood Gulch to every dead Freelancer, he's a freaking magnet for them. Somehow they've migrated up from the quagmires of Louisiana and the Gulf to other planets and other worlds, slipped into the back of everyone's necks. Church feels haunted, but he also feels like the commander of a victorious army.

* * *

><p><strong>3.<strong>

Because CT had been right all along she did not die with the board on her thoughts, or the faces of the people she had known. She regretted only not leaving the program sooner. But because CT had been right all along she could not see the value in looking into his eyes, because love was the shadow breaking the door down, and CT had been right to run from that too.

****


	48. Ten Twelve

**A/N: **The release of my 10.11 story may be delayed slightly due to it becoming a comic instead of a story!

* * *

><p><strong> Sarcophagus<strong>

They were all just sitting or lying, like desert creatures on a hot day finding the shade of pyramids, with Connie on the couch with her legs stretched out, South on the floor with her hair flicking when Connie threw a wad of paper at it, and Carolina standing straight as a science classroom skeleton, staring at an empty screen.

She knows, knows without a doubt, sees it in every fiber of the couch and every metal shape of the walls -

These are good people.

These are angry people, frustrated people, people cooped up too long in secret passages that they can't see the outside. They are maze-climbers, wall-breakers, and they have become very, very good at living in captivity. Regardless, they are good. Morality does not see the maze walls.

Carolina trusts; trusts as Connie turns her head toward the couch to yawn, her breath invisible and her nose scrunching up; trusts as South grabs heavily at the TV remote.

They will kill and they will steal but they would never kill her and will never steal from her. Never steal from their friends. (This is why when Connie leaves Carolina fights to get her back alive, and when Wash tells Carolina what happens to the Dakotas she walks to the beach and kicks at the water because no matter how hard she puts her foot down it doesn't stop coming in, dirty with pebbles and dead things.)

Carolina thinks none of this consciously: it's only later, when she's standing on the blasted fortress with York (the memories of York, remember that, don't think he's alive, she demands herself) fading away gold and green across the sea. She thinks back, slowly knows, and just as slowly and carefully flits across the surface of those thoughts and lets them fade away. The Freelancers were not admitted into any afterlife that demanded a household go with it: they were not made to last forever.

Because of this she can feel them leaving on her breath as York fades back into Epsilon.

And because of this, she does not need to weigh their hearts to know they were good.


	49. Ten Fifteen

**10.15**

"Get me a match."

Four live people in the room and it's the computer who responds, the FILSS voice from the tiny speaker grills in the ceiling. "Agent Carolina, are you sure you are recovered?"

She's grimacing, her chin pulled up and her lips bloodless, but she just stares down the invisible voice. "Get me a match."

"Prepping the training floor, now. Which team would you like to compete against, Agent Carolina?"

The answer is immediate and flat. "Texas."

Carolina swings her legs off the cot and hooks her helmet from the shelf beside her. York stands up, Wash turning slowly and Maine still shaking his head at a medic, and in that tiny space Carolina starts walking out. York just follows. "Carolina. Are you okay? How are the AI?"

She says nothing, pushes the helmet down over her bobbing ponytail, and takes the quick way to the training floor. Wash hesitates at the left-hand hall, wanting to go to the viewing platform instead. "Can she even set up a match without the Director knowing?"

York waves him off, follows Carolina. York can't even see them, the two AI she supposedly has. "Now, you're probably going to be experiencing something kindof…weird." He thinks back to Delta's coldness, and the ache at the back of his neck. She says nothing. Just marches to the floor.

When she gets there, everything's set up. York looks up at the lights already on, the tables building themselves in the edges of the center circle. Even Tex is there on the other side like another programed part of a play.

He's getting a bit tired of feeling like the audience.

He's got Delta there, though, that worried, reassuring mechanical feeling, and among all the other autonomy he cannot fear that one. So, because it is all that he knows how to do, he starts to tell Carolina what she'll feel. He starts to explain, because he would have liked someone to explain to him.

She still won't look at him, but that's not a first, so he just keeps talking.


	50. Ten Sixteen

**10.16  
><strong>

"Fix what's broken," he says, his throat still hoarse from the unexpected ratcheting scream when Carolina threw Texas into the fire, and holds the capture unit out to the thin, waiting tentacles curled inside the metal box.

(The only Covenant alive in human control, and he stole it, he and his beautiful chess-piece soldiers, knock a few down to get to the checkmate. And this, the king of technologies, alien and subtle and Halsey would never have known to use it, it's his alone —

But fall too far into the love of the work and he starts to remember why he can love it, why he greets the AI by name and keeps the Huragok fed himself, pushing the little tubes into the box.

This is backlash love, so that he doesn't think too hard about her.

Because he feels backlash hate too, hatred for the AI that they can be so comforted, self-desiccating hatred for the Alpha that enables him to listen, dry-eyed, to that voice that is not his but occasionally speaks words he knows he put together. They're like phrases spoken by a friend that he recognizes were spoken first, and often, from his own mouth.

Alpha can scream about Agent Texas all he wants. The Director has seen Agent Texas. She was a steel body lying on an operating table, all wires and pins, translucent.

It's very rarely that he confuses her with Allison, but when he does it's like he's swallowed a stone.

And then he is back to thinking of her as Texas the machine again, the industrial revolution writ small and sick-minded and deadly, and she is not the concern.

Allison, distant, is the concern.

Keeping her separate from his thoughts is essential.

Keeping her fed to the AI only in tantalizing drips of rumor, like a narcotic, like the Alpha itself, is also essential.

Let him focus on the Huragok, and keeping alive the creature that is making Tex's hundred simulated deaths, each tumbled from his mouth as if giving the words away will free them from his memory, worthwhile.)

He won't let the creature near the AI.

It might try to fix them, and that's the last thing he wants.


	51. DoubleO

**Double-O**

It just came up in conversation, when they were telling their history stories, because that's what Caboose and Donut did. They both liked stories, so Donut, on Caboose's urging, started telling Carolina about that time that Donut killed Tex.

"I just lobbed a grenade, and…woosh! Pegged her."

Carolina leveled her flat-browed hawk gaze on him. "You what?"

"I killed her. But it was okay, because she came back."

Carolina stalked forward. "You killed the number one Freelancer with a grenade from across a field?"

_That's some kind of justice for York _floated through her mind.

"Um, yeah!" said Donut, not backing up. "She was number one? In order of what? Does that make me number one?"

Carolina can sense the other people around her, hearing the crunch of their footsteps, and she's pretty sure that it wouldn't help the mission to hit any of them.

She hits the next tree they come to and Donut dances around in the raining leaves, humming a secret agent theme.


	52. Last Confession

**Last Confession  
><strong>

The first time he said it he was flushed and pale, sitting there in sweatpants and an emblazoned t-shirt like everything was normal but she could still smell the armor on him, the inside curves of hundred-pound racks of metal worth more than the average house, the stuff designed for them to run around and get shot in. She hunched over on the bench in front of the starscape and he sat up straight like he was afraid to do anything else. Muttered words about trivialities and she said something and he laughed and just said it.

"I love you," he said, and she let him stroke her hair behind her ear and let the words sink through her, wondering what she was supposed to do with them.

The last time she said it she was feeling the armor crack slowly as it settled in around the axe wound, and she said it only inside her head because the man looking at her slack-jawed would just have gotten even more distracted by those words than he was all ready, and the mission was the important thing right now. The mission was in a metal pocket on her hip, data half in alien languages that she didn't know how to contextualize or read.

The Leader was going to cry, going to do something stupidly symbolic, before he thought to concern himself with the data she had stolen (again).

She said it to herself because she was the only one she could trust to have all the information.

She said it to herself because Wash would have known better than to let words like that get in his way.


	53. Commonality

**Commonality  
><strong>

He couldn't sleep on his back because South had shot him twice just beside his spine, and he couldn't sleep on his right side because his arm and his ribs still ached from the Warthog crash, so some nights he took Tucker's watch, and Caboose's too if he'd even remembered to go outside. Agent Washington walked the perimeter. In the gray shadows the yellow patches on his armor would confuse a searchlight operator into thinking he saw only the reflection of his own light.

He would hear the song, and tonight, he actually listened to the words.

Funny thing was Wash had heard this before, just wafting through the airwaves. He'd never heard it so clearly before. It inhabited Outpost 17 like a ghost. "I just wish that Grif was dead, put a bullet through his head…"

For all Sarge commanded the least efficient army in the universe he had, by mistake or intent, created a persona that demanded to be followed. That voice wormed its way around Wash's speakers and tapped at his helmet, inviting him to do what soldiers do -

Kill people, right? That's what soldiers do?

He felt the ache that kept him awake but this time it was in his knuckles too and the backs of his legs, making him want to run and hit something - anyone, especially someone wearing armor so obnoxiously orange that it wouldn't serve as camouflage at all.

Something commanding him just like he commanded the Meta.

"Put a bullet through his head…"

Wash shook it off. That was Sarge's voice. He'd heard weirder things bellowed through the outpost, although not many. The Reds were too busy infighting. Although he did not consider abandoning his watch, he dialed his audio down and kept walking, focusing on his footsteps and the play of the yellow light from his rifle in the dark.

Although Agent Washington could sleep through a lot, he knew he didn't like the idea that teamkilling was the one thing the Reds, Blues, and Freelancers all had in common.


	54. Ten Eighteen

**Collaboration  
><strong>

Sigma tattooed him with his own hands.

The tiny needles chattered and Maine braced one knuckle against the back of his neck and drew in his skin with the other hand, the blood slowly coating his left-hand fingers, his eyes shut.

Wash was in Recovery, his bed across the room made so well that it looked lifeless and empty.

Maine kept his eyes closed as the needles skittered over the thin skin of his skull, nicking the irregularities.

Part of him felt the pain, but another part reigned him in.

[[Don't move too much]], Sigma told him. [[That will only make it worse.]]

(But it was _bad_, it _hurt_ like someone slowly picking him apart.)

[[Don't worry]], Sigma said, eternally calm like a patient teacher, [[This will help us. This will let us understand.]]

Maine, who could feel Sigma's thoughts tangling in his, did not believe that because Sigma did not believe it. The tattoo was a symbol of violence, of the Meta ([[Of that moment]], Sigma said inside his thoughts as the needles buzzed over his skull and around his delicate neural implant, [[in which we become the collaboration that will bring us to the Alpha]]).

Maine felt his eyes unfocus at the thought of the Alpha. It was all he wanted. He did not need to see.

The outline of the mark was almost finished. Maine had felt his hands move without knowing what patterns they were making, and even now he could not picture it. Sigma lived as fire under his nails and around his wrists like handcuffs. Maine's thoughts looped from the pain to the black wall in front of him and back to the pain again, observing it with doctoral Sigma-distance even as his eyes welled and his hand became stickier with blood.

The back of his neck was the hardest part, requiring the most steadiness, but with Sigma in control bodily weaknesses were irrelevant, were tied down and restrained, and so it simply hurt less, for a little while, until the needles hit the top of his spine.

Sigma bruised him all the way around the back of his head with the needles, and then started in on the center of the mark.

Maine was not sure how long this would take, but his shoulders were starting to hurt and he didn't think he should be hearing all that machine buzz in his ears. Arced backwards to reach both hands to the back of his neck he looked unnatural, like a corpse hanging.

Without the ability to reach for anything himself, for a while he traced the lines on the walls with his eyes. He felt the strange sensation of his flinch reflex being quelled, nervous seismic waves of skin rippling back into their places in a forced relaxation.

Every once in a while, he remembered what he was doing.

He wasn't sure what the symbol was that Sigma wanted cut into their skin.

He kept going, his hands held steady.


	55. The Naming of Names

I found this bit about the Insurrectionists in a desk drawer. It was probably written before 10.10, because I have trouble writing Pills as anything but a parody of himself now. But in this fic, he's named Josh.

* * *

><p><strong>the naming of names<br>**

The team that would become the best the Insurrectionists had to offer stood in a starship and bickered.

Josh did not know any of their names yet. A man with thick, bare arms stood at a window, impassive. Josh took this as permission to also stand at the window, gawking.

"There's so much space out there!"

"That's why they call it space, genius." The hand-to-hand specialist had removed her helmet so that her blonde hair poked at her shoulders in little curling spikes. She eased up on the other side of Josh like she and Muscles had planned a flanking maneuver.

Maybe they're nice, Josh thought. Maybe they're good people.

"But look at it," he said. "You could get lost out there. What if one of us does?"

She sighed. "We've known each other for three days. I'd live."

The pyro specialist was sitting on a bench in the back of the room, closer to the main halls of the Staff of Charon. He grunted. "Don't worry so much."

Josh turned to face them. "But we're a team. We're friends. I wouldn't let you down, and I don't think you'd let me down either."

"Yeah," said the blonde. "We're all on the same side. We get it. Lay off the happy pills, dude. Maybe that should be your call sign."

Muscles grumbled. Josh didn't know his name, but he'd walked in with the woman. Muscles still had his helmet on. He said, "And you'll get a big old' heart and a pair of kissy lips because you're just so cuddly."

"Hey, hey, don't...don't fight." The silence wasn't friendly. Josh turned back to the window. "We've got enough enemies out there. We don't need them in here too."

The pyro grunted again and the blonde knocked on the glass before turning to go. "I'll say."

Josh watched her go for a moment before trying to start a conversation with Muscles. He didn't think it would work, but it was worth a try.


	56. Ten Nineteen

**10.19  
><strong>

He wonders, in a moment of lucidity, whether CT saw this coming.

The ship is breaking apart. The Alpha is screaming it, and even in the Recovery ward, Wash and Epsilon hear. They thrash, but they were tied down days ago, and the immobility is terrifying.

But this isn't CT's type of destruction. Wash doesn't think she would have prophesied this: even at her darkest she didn't have the wreck of theMother of Inventionin her. (Epsilon doesn't think of her at all. ) CT wanted the program and the ship grounded in more subtle ways. If anyone was going to bring down the ship it was…he's not sure, names swimming inside his head as the deck pitches andhe can't reach his arms out to brace himself.

The ship is wounded. Something in an engine revs up and dies, leaving a gulf of sound where he hadn't noticed sound before.

Maybe this is York-destruction. York would be brash like this, would see the whole sky as his piece of paper to write on in fire.

Wash can't remember where York is supposed to be now. Wash knows the fire evacuation protocols: he remembers the drills, running through the hallway with Connie's hand in his. (She always slipped away when she saw someone else coming.) He remembers standing on a mustering platform in the early days of the war and wishing he could go down to where the troops were practicing. He tried to catch a glimpse of her blonde hair under the square-edged helmets, but in so many faces she isn't distinct.

Epsilon rouses and turns over inside Wash's head, dizzying him so that he looks toward the floor. Someone cleaned up the latest vomit stains hours ago. Looking doesn't help, because the deck is tipping. He fights against the restraints and can't get free, can't even bend his elbows or his knees. His neck aches, but that isn't new.

Wash almost takes comfort in the feeling of helplessness. Someone will be assigned to get him. The medics are assigned to help the patients during the fire alarms.

He knows the protocols, although he never practiced them.

The ship is tilting further. He has no idea what's going on outside, but blankets are starting to float off other beds and hover in the air like ghosts. There are more sounds of explosions, intentional-sounding crashes in the distance.

And Wash thinks then that this is Allison-destruction, raw and pushy and fearless, and Epsilon lolls back against the thin pillow, because they feel safe in her hands.


	57. Ten Twenty-one

**10.21**

She has had nightmares like this before, but Epsilon was not in them.

A room full of Texes looking at her, and in the dream Carolina knew that, like in a house of mirrors, they were really only all reflections of one unseen whole. Sometimes in the dream they fought her, her punches glancing off onyx armor and sparking. Sometimes they talked at her in a language she couldn't understand, sounds like FILSS's comforting voice, but in no language she understood.

Sometimes, the crowd just stared, and looked at her with their yellow eyes, and let her look at herself in the reflections.

She hated her silhouette.

Sometimes, like in reality, her armor grew heavy and overheated and died, and Carolina fell to her knees as Tex became a black cloud and pressed her into the floor.

But Epsilon hadn't been there. She hadn't had this familiar voice in her head. Epsilon's voice, that had transformed into Delta's and York's and told her without so many words to be kind to herself, was now cracking with pain and out of control. Eta and Iota had not been like this: their small, eager voices had melded with her own so quickly that she hardly had time to get to know anything except their emotions inside her.

But Epsilon was almost human.

She wondered whether the Director had broken more AI to make these, or whether they were just robots, programmed with a semblance of the voice and style of the woman Carolina fought.

Either way, Epsilon was overheating in the back of her head and she could feel sweat on her legs even inside the armor and black bodies kept attacking, hating her, before she pushed them away. Maybe if she pushed enough she would prove herself. Maybe she would finally _be_ —

_"Carolina, stop!"_

Then Tex's arm out of nowhere caught her under the chin, lifted her up, knocked her on her back and seemed to jar Epsilon enough that it sent a spike of pain up their spine.

"I can't do it. I can never beat her."

Epsilon was quiet, tired, gasping in the back of her head and he had no answer because the Reds and Blues and Wash had burst through the door and answers to her personal questions weren't important now.

Carolina stood up with Wash's help. The Texes regrouped, posturing, all shoulders.

Carolina looked at Wash, at Tucker, at all of them, and thought _this wasn't in the nightmares_.


	58. Recovery

This is slightly too long for this collection, but I decided to put it here because it wouldn't quite work as a full story either. It's set in a vague AU where CT didn't leave. CT/Wash.

* * *

><p>"Can I come in?"<p>

"Yeah?"

The door slides open at her presence but Connie waits for Wash's hesitant say-so to come in. He's sick, after all. That's how the Director wants his agents to think of it. Wash is sick, and soon he'll get better.

Connie isn't so sure, but once she decided to stay by his side she couldn't change that: in front of the board she had chosen one selfless act over another and taken her helmet back from Wash's hands. "I'll give you a chance," she said then. "Just a chance," and she could hear the smile in his next breath.

She stayed for him, and then he took Epsilon.

But they're doing alright, now, they really are: the tests say so but Wash himself confirms it, and the AI seems stable after whatever happened.

Stable, but not healthy.

Wash and Epsilon are just sitting in the bed in Recovery when she comes in, and he gives her a tight smile beneath a face puffy from lack of sleep. She smiles back.

"That's...CT, right?" says Epsilon. "Agent Connecticut."

She's not quite comfortable talking to the AI: she nods and meets Wash's eyes instead of the glowing blue visor. Epsilon doesn't have Theta's cuteness or Delta's disarmingly honest artificial voice. "How are you doing?"

"The headaches come and go." He sounds more curt than usual. "How is it out there?"

"About the same."

He smiles. "Could you get me a glass of water?"

"Sure."

She leaves, ducks into a medical ward a few doors down and fills up a plastic cup with water from a tiny metal sink.

When she comes back, Wash is gone. He's still there, lying with his throat exposed. Epsilon is perched on his chest looking into his closed eyes like a doctor looking for dilation. Every few moments, with just a little too much time between them, Wash's lips part and a soft breath whooshes out.

This isn't unusual.

CT remains calm, addressing the side of Epsilon's transparent head. "Is he sleeping?"

"No." The little AI sounds worried, ramping up to frenetic. "I think he's remembering. I don't think he's okay!"  
>The fear sinks into her, but she knows this isn't a violent sort of episode. It isn't, because Epsilon doesn't even know it's happening. CT's not sure - maybe there's inherent falsehoods in interpreting the action of AI as the actions of people, maybe she can't even speak about what's going on without including zeroes and ones. But she's pretty sure Epsilon has shuffled his memories off into Wash, that he's divorced them from himself without even knowing it, that he's continuing trying to split from the Alpha.<p>

Wash's head is going to fill up from all these thoughts and crack open some day.

For now, he's stable.

CT says, "Epsilon."

He looks at her like a bird about to fly away.

"He'll be okay. He's done this before."

"I...I don't remember!"

"I know. But you have to trust me."

Epsilon sighs, ragged, and she's not even sure how something without a throat can make a noise with that much dry, flayed skin in it. He has the same voice that Alpha does, that slightly grating bass with a tendency to break. A grown man who still sounds like a boy sometimes. "Did I do this?"

"It's not your fault."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Okay."

She knows that if Epsilon starts guilting himself he'll just make more half-formed memories to push onto Wash. CT's not the only Freelancer who's come to visit like this, who's had to tell both of them that no, even though they feel okay they're not ready to go back to combat yet. Yet, like there's a cure somewhere. Like he's been diagnosed with anything that anyone except the Director understands.

CT's only staying because she wants to understand too, and the Director isn't making that easy, but he is telegraphing his distress, in his hidden eyes and his visits to Wash and the regular checkups on North and York too, in the frigid frailty with which Carolina talks about eventually getting her AI. CT is sure that she will soon. Giving Sigma to Maine wasn't an act of humanitarianism. Carolina, and the Director, are waiting for something better than him.  
>At least Epsilon doesn't have that ridiculous flame overlay.<p>

She sits on the bed and swings her legs onto the crinkly hospital sheets, easing her back against the thin pillow and touching her shoulder to Wash's. Epsilon flees to his other side, and CT takes a moment to lift herself up and track the AI, making sure he moves far enough away.

Just because she talks to him doesn't mean she likes him. He's got that in common with people.

His fretting feeling is not unfounded, though. She can tell that it isn't right now. Wash doesn't react when she lays down next to him. He's just gone, occasionally blinking, his pale lips moving in an internal dialogue she can't comprehend. Maybe she shouldn't be here; maybe he'll lash out. Maybe she'll take scars from him yet.

In a moment he resurfaces and licks his lips. Epsilon flickers and gives out a wordless burst of vocalization, maybe putting pieces of himself back together faster than a human can understand.

They're not supersoldiers, CT thinks. Very few of them are. They're the kind of superhero whose power is killing them. What does North talk about? Gamma radiation.

She closes her eyes, her back uncomfortable at the angle Wash arranged the pillows, trying to hold this moment inside her somehow like the little falling world inside a snowglobe. "We're going to save the world, Wash."

"The world?"

"Yes."

"Which parts of it?" He cajoles, his voice growing stronger as he warms to his joking attitude.

"England. Austin. Calcutta. Specific parts."

She opens her eyes just enough to see him through her lashes, to check to make sure that he's still there.

He is. Talking in his own voice, breathing in his own breath. "Those sound like good parts."

"This part too," she says, and places her hand over his, her thin fingers fitting in the warm hollows between his knuckles.

He relaxes, turning his head to mold the pillow to his shape while his hair brushes against the sheets. He closes his eyes. She warms to the idea of him there, the appearance of health, and casual masculinity. "That's good."

"Do you want your water?"

"You brought me water?"

"Yes, Wash."

Epsilon looks up. Wash says, "Not now. Okay."

CT has spent too much time wondering which of them remembers which part of their siamese twin life. She's done with that for now. Like Epsilon, she needs more information first. "Okay."


	59. And In Health

This takes place in the same AU as "Memory as Full-Time Occupation", a.k.a. the "happy suburban AU" tag on my tumblr. A friend requested York/Carolina.

* * *

><p>York proposed to her in a park where she often jogged.<p>

Nothing fancy. Neither of them would have wanted it to be. They had lived in space for so long that a temperate home on solid ground was good enough for everything, looked and did not stop looking like paradise.

Still, joy was not Carolina's first response to the ring in the box in his large hands and that wide idiot smile that crinkled the skin at the edges of his eyes. Instead she felt an animal panic as the warm wind tossed her hair and his knee sank incrementally into the soft grass.

If she had been thinking more clearly she might have thought that, in her every experience, marriage was just a preparation for a family breaking apart: it was just a goodbye wrapped up in a gold circle. Because she was not thinking so clearly she thought that marriage terrified her because it was not something she could be good at: it implied that mistakes would be made and forgiveness required, it implied sickness along with health.

Except that she had gone through both before: she had learned, slowly, that adequate was okay. She felt the panic like the wind, lifting the hair on her arms. York eased the ring toward her with a cocky showman smile, with 'you know you want it' in his eyes, but a moment later the pretense (and his eyebrows) dropped and he looked worried, wondering whether she would continue the stony silence.

(He was hers. He was her York, and he had not changed by handing this to her, and she loved him.)

She took the box in both her hands and smiled.

When she did, the reservations dropped and the flood of emotion that came next did not frighten her. When he smiled again, gaining his confidence back, she took one hand off the box to grab his shirt and pull him into a kiss. The fingers of her left hand tightened around the box, claiming it, becoming comfortable.


	60. Riposte

In which Carolina's parentage is known.

* * *

><p>The day on which they were closest to friendship Connie and Carolina sat in the mess with no one left around them, coffee mugs in their hands. They each held one cup between their palms, as if to warm themselves or prevent the drinks from escaping. Carolina drank with her eyes closed. Some instinct in Connie saw this as a chance, both an animal opportunity to attack and a human declaration of intimacy.<p>

She took the chance.

"Maybe the scores are rigged," Connie said, looking at Carolina's manicured hands. "Maybe they don't matter at all. Because you're his daughter, you win."  
>Carolina's eyes opened, that unreal-looking green. "The scores depend on how well we fight." Her voice was even. She moved a strand of red hair out of her eyes.<p>

Connie wondered for a quick moment whether she could retract such a precise nerve-strike. "I didn't mean to..." Or had she? It was so nice to get exactly the reaction she expected.

"I wonder that too sometimes," Carolina said, quiet and reverent. Then, her calm, lofty tone returned. "Don't apologize for trying to win. None of us do that."

Connie looked at her over the rim of her coffee mug filled with tea.

Later, Connie realized that she had the not uncommon sensation of missing something she had never had. Being around Carolina wasn't pleasant (any more.)

They found a new, workable status quo while making sure to keep it that way.


	61. Organization

Flowers had made the chart shortly after Blue Team was formed. Tucker had, at the time, wondered whether it was an unusual fit of organization. Flowers suggested they requisition gold stars so they could mark their achievements on it. It was around that time that Tucker stopped listening and went to see what the Reds were doing.

* * *

><p>When Caboose saw the chart he asked what it was for.<p>

"It's so we know who's on the team, rookie, come on." Church sighed. On the other side of him, Tucker settled in to hear how this would go.

"Because you forget?" Caboose said. "Sometimes I forget my name too."

"No, it's - shut up."

"I did not say anything."

"Shut up!"

"Does writing my name count as speaking."

"Can you even spell 'Caboose'?"

"Do I have to answer that."

"I'll do it."

* * *

><p>Later, Church scribbled out Flowers' name with bold, angry slashes of blue marker. He cackled a little as he wrote his own.<p>

* * *

><p>Church marked Grif's sister on the chart out of some remnant sense of obligation to Command, Tucker thought. When he got used to having her on the team, he didn't think much about that either.<p>

"Do you even know her name?" He asked Church once.

"She's Grif's sister. She doesn't mind."

She didn't even look at the chart, so Tucker didn't bother about it any more either.

* * *

><p>"Hey. Hey man." On one perpetually sunny day Church walked up to Tucker on the cliffside.<p>

"What?"

"Should we put Doc on the chart, or…?"

"I don't care. He's a healer. He's neutral."

"He's not on Red Team…"

"He sleeps here."

"Most of the time."

"Okay, so what's the standard for most of the time? Tex sleeps here some times. Like, a few times. Some."

"Tex isn't on the chart."

"That's right. She isn't. Why is that?"

"Because she's not on the team," Church said.

"Also because Flowers didn't know her."

"Also, that. Do you want to answer my questions or do you want me to…answer my own questions?"

"Uuhh. To be honest, I'll take the latter. It requires me to be more lazy, and you to do something that you can only blame yourself for."

"Fine!"

Tucker shrugged.

Church wrote Doc's name on the chart.

* * *

><p>When they pulled the chart out again, from inside one of the most heavily reinforced boxes that had survived the crash, Tucker noticed how Church's name pushed up against 'Alpha'.<p>

* * *

><p>Wash took his time looking over the chart. He tipped his head, spun the gray crayon between the fingers of his left hand. Caboose had enthusiastically given him the crayon when Wash asked if the team had any writing supplies.<p>

Wash muttered, "This'll work."

At first he didn't cross out Church's name. "Aren't you gonna, yknow," said Tucker, and Wash looked at him.

Tucker made a scribbling gesture.

Wash said, "Church isn't gone. He might come back."

"Yeah, but you're team leader."

"Right. So I can decide."

Wash crossed Church's name off anyway - not angrily, not slowly. Patiently. So cold that Tucker stepped back and thought about how his name was the only one that had never changed.

"Hey, look at that. I'm the only original one on the board."

Caboose said, "Well, that's not very nice."

"It's not a board," Wash said. "It's a chart." He moved the crayon from name to name, up and down, tracing the imperfections.

"Right. The Blue Team organizational chart. I know by now not to ask whether chart-making is a Freelancer thing."

"Do you know better?" Wash turned to him.

"Yeah. Definitely," Tucker said. "I'm gonna, I'm gonna go."

He looked back one more time to see his untouched name.


	62. Eleven Nineteen

Agent Washington opens gummed eyelids and watches the verdant world spinning.

His back aches. He's going to have scars on top of scars. His chest aches too, every rib picked out by bruising that probably came from the edges of his own armor, braising his skin.

_ I've had enough of this._

Footsteps drag across the canyon and then Locus is in front of him, the pursed mouth of the mask looking blindly down. When Wash blinks again the spinning stops, but the trees and canyon wall behind Locus are still out of focus. _Concussion,_ Wash thinks. _That might be what this means._

He licks his lips to slosh the stale taste out of his mouth.

The others got away, at least. Some of them. Wash has never been so relieved to see a path closed off.

"Well," Locus says.

Wash doesn't care enough to answer.

_I've had enough._ Not just of his friends dying or him killing them, not just of Freelancers dying, but of people, messing things up. This small war he didn't sign up for. He thinks that the last thing he saw clearly, before the battle-haze hit him, was a white-armored soldier's foot rocking back and forth as the person died.

He looks to the side and sees Sarge, lying on the ground with his back snugged up against a sand bag. As Wash watches, the old man's fist clenches and he mutters. "Lasers and robots. Robots, and lasers."

Locus follows Wash gaze and then stares back at him."Do you know why I'm keeping you alive?"

"Ah. Well. Because we're just so pretty?"

"Because you know how to repair things like this." He - she? Wash knows well enough not even to be sure - activates his invisibility augmentation and turns into a kaleidoscopic pattern of wavering lines.

_ Carolina did say that someone might be stealing Freelancer equipment._

Locus has troops stationed all around them: Wash can see two on the canyon walls, two nearby with turrets, a squad with rifles. This small war may have gotten bigger.

"Don't go anywhere," Locus' voice says, and the footsteps crunch away.

When Wash sits up, his legs shake just from moving. The guards look at him, curious and impassive.

He crawls over to Sarge, shoves the other man's shoulder.

"Hurr." Sarge shakes his head like a wet dog. He pushes himself off the ground, looks at the troops around him. "Well, Wash. We gonna kill these guys?"

"Yes." Wash feels hunched and empty without his rifle in his hands. "We're gonna kill these guys."


	63. The New Republic

Vanessa Kimball had started a rebellion.

For something that called itself an Empire, there was nothing grand about Locus and his mysterious benefactor. The people of Korus were poverty-stricken and starving. Its New Republic fared slightly better than its common folk because they had teamwork and organized piracy, which was the reason half of them had joined up.

Another set joined because they had seen the _Star Wars_ quadrilogy. She herself was tired and hungry, so tired she leaned back sometimes and lets the helmet take the weight of her skull.

And now these heroes. At first they had been just rumors. This one saved an alien race. This one killed a _freelancer_ (whatever that meant. They said it in hushed tones.) The Red and Blue Armies became less of a rumor and more of a cause, especially for Felix.

It had hurt Kimball too, to see Felix come back to base alone except for these brightly-colored hero-rumors. She made sure to soften the blow as soon as she told him he wouldn't be fully paid.

In her ideal world, she wouldn't need the help any help from outside - not mercenaries, not UNSC splinter groups - because the Empire would be gone. The people of Korus would be able to ascend to the surface and farm without armies shooting them in the back. They wouldn't have to keep skulking in caves.

She liked the notion that the people most suited for power were the ones who tended to want it the least. It gave her both the hope that she would be good at leadership and the encouragement that she wouldn't become a despot.

Vanessa Kimball hoped she wouldn't have to lead this rebellion for long.


	64. Thanatos and Cassandra

He scowls under a black beard and she realizes that she does not know how old he is. There is no gray in Leonard Church's hair. He gestures over the top of the table, not a complicated sigil of finger-movements like the white-hat hackers Connie trained with; those holographic dances unleashed to execute meticulous maneuvers or to impress the impressionable; Leonard Church gestures like he is tired of machines not doing what he tells them. He wants to make it simple for himself, and he wants to chop at the throat of anything smarter than he is.

At first, the display that darts into view in blue and white letters is just a string of numbers. The she recognizes it as the same scale by which the top Freelancers are rated - a number, a decimal. Whether it is determined by shots fired or bullets dodged or something else, more specific to the individual, she does not know. She thinks of asking, but then remembers Wash's number on the leaderboard - 5.45 - and Carolina and York jockeying between 7.3 and 7.2. South is in the fours somewhere, competing primarily with Maine.

The Director had a white mug of gently steaming coffee in front of him when Connie walked in, and now he cracks open a sealed aluminum container of powdered creamer and shakes it in. The pack is quartered into four cells like a honeycomb, and Leonard Church systematically perforates each of them with his thumbnail and pours out the powder.

The display in front of him reads 1.254.

"You are consistently close to making the top eight, Agent Connecticut. Something is keeping you from that board. I suggest you discover what exactly it is." He stops, looks at her. He's masked just like the rest of them, even if the dark glasses conceal less than a crash helmet, but that usually doesn't stop her from seeing the intended expression. The Director radiates authoritative disapproval.

Connie says, "Is this a pep talk, sir?"

He looks at her seriously, skeptically, the skin visible just above his dark lenses wrinkling. "It is a warning, Agent Connecticut."

And until that moment she hadn't really known that it was - she is used to the army, where if people are angry at you they scream, and the Director was being so patient that she thought that his chastisement was instead a challenge or a puzzle to solve. She realizes then that she probably should have been more deferent but can't back down now.

She lowers her chin almost to her collar. "I understand, sir."

"Make sure you pay attention in the future."

She nods.

"Let the next one in."

He doesn't salute her. He stays leaning over the table, both of his hands on the holographic plates, leaving fingerprints on the fine display glass. She wonders whether she is supposed to salute or turn on her heel, but he doesn't even straighten up, so she does neither.

The next agent, waiting outside the door of the war room, is Carolina.

"Straighten up, Connie," Carolina says, voice quiet, her own blue-armored back as straight as the wall behind her.

"Tell _him_ that," Connie fires back, passing Wash and North in the middle of the line, thinking about the Director's old-man swipe at the computer and the creamer spiraling into the coffee -

Later, she will think back on the interpersonal experiments the Director had done - his plans to pit the twins against each other, to use Tex's competitive nature to drive Carolina into thinking that two AI were her idea - and wonder whether he was performing one on Connie as well. Had his words been chosen to eat away at her, to slowly create the belief that she would never be on the board? Even as she defeated him with his own data, was all this according to his plan?

In the end she overestimated his foresight just as he underestimated hers.


	65. Remembrance

Pangs of remembrance sneak up on him, flagged with the carefully observed markers that tell him they're his.

He sees her in the way Simmons holds onto facts, in Tucker's occasional deadly precision with a gun or an energy blade, in Grif's unconcern, in Sarge's creativity. He sees her in numbers and letters, in the dog tags that hang across his chest.

He sees her in Carolina most of all, during the long, ragged journey she and Epsilon take toward the Director. Carolina knew CT's movements and mannerisms the best out of all of them, even though the two women had such different mental landscapes.

Wash sees CT in all of them when they fight their way into the Director's last fortress and find a man for which he feels less hatred than pity.

He sees her in himself when he listens for radio transmissions across the verdant continents of Chorus, knowing that someone is out here, knowing that someone flesh and bone might be sneaking up behind him too.

* * *

><p><em>An anonyomous prompt from tumblr.<em>


	66. soldier

You've seen his files. You say his name because you know that it, the name that died in the snow with him, gets under his skin. The Freelancers destroyed everyone who knew that Washington had once been someone else.

"David."

He doesn't look up at you from inside the cell. His hands are manacled together and chained to the floor. It's intended to intimidate, to impress upon the prisoner the severity of his situation rather than to serve a practical purpose. You don't need the cuffs, really, since his armor hunches over in a stasis prompted by codes salvaged from Freelancer and refined by the Federation. His gear weighs him down, and he is lying tipped slightly forward in its shell.

"David."

He only lets you see the matted hair on the crown of his head, and the top of one ear, blackened with dried blood. You're not good with faces anyway. Masks are easier to interpret, without filmy eyes or elastic mouths getting in the way. Blank spaces are best, with absolutely nothing to interpret, inviting no questions. Washington obliges you in this.

But you are a not a connoisseur of art or philosophy, not really. You are craftsman who knows exactly how skilled he is in the craft of taking lives apart. The manacles and the armor lock serve as tools - the best you can do for sensory deprivation in the field. You know what has been done to this soldier by his special forces group.

You know that things rip at the seams.

"Washington."

He looks up. His eyes blink once, slowly, between dark circles and purple bruises. His brow furrows, but the blank slackness of the rest of his face tells you with every inch that he wants to murder you and isn't picky about how.

You say, "I know. But you won't escape. You and your friends couldn't hide all of the history of the Freelancers, even after the Director's death. They tend to have high rates of friendly fire for an elite group, don't they? And I'm very interested in seeing how that history keeps playing out. You'll see your friends soon enough. I can't guarantee the state they'll be in, though. But I'll show you. We'll see what you start to remember."


	67. Laws

_My friend requested "Connie's an undercover cop and she suspects Wash of being involved in a jewel heist that went down two days ago at the museum across the street from his apartment."_

* * *

><p>Connie didn't usually frequent this uptown bar, but not for any particular reason - her friends simply never lead her there, and she had not been interested in exploring on her own. Inside it was dark but not blinding, occupied but not crowded, clean but not intimidatingly edged with high-end decor. She found the man she was looking for fast enough because he flinched. She scraped a stool across the floor to his left and he looked at her fast, scarred skin still pink around a foggy white eye.<p>

His right eye was a clear blue that held almost enough boyish charisma for the both of them. She didn't recognize him from her beat, and thought it was safe to assume that he did not know her. She brushed a long strand of hair away from her eyes and gave him a few lines of small talk that did not teach her much more about him, and then played her hand. She asked whether he'd seen anything suspicious around, anyone strange going in and out of the apartments nearby. Making like she lived there, like she was a concerned citizen.

"Suspicious? No. Definitely, ah, no." He rubbed his hand across the back of his head and nodded.

"There was that heist. I'm worried."

"Oh, that!" He stretched the word out into a relieved exclamation. This perked her ears up - he sounded legitimately surprised, as if whatever he had been thinking about before had been removed from his mind. "I heard about that."

She leaned closer, trying for friendly. "You seem nervous."

"My roommate's got a cat. We think the landlord might be onto us." He yawned hugely and leaned back. "Are you going to get a drink, or...?" His smile was generous but not creepy, and she immediately liked him to a degree which struck her as dangerous. The feeling of camaraderie became even stronger when he hesitated over his next few words. "It's just that if people sit on this side, things are kind of blurry. If you could..."

She pushed away from the bar stool, this time managing not to make a noise loud enough to hear in the next state. "I appreciate it. Busy night."

He waved a hand as she went out, dodging tall people in rain gear on the way. She saw the reason for the costumery as soon as she got outside. As the sun had gone down clouds and humidity had come in over the city, leaving a starless night that practically shouted rain.

The suspect nearly walked into her almost as soon as she stepped onto the sidewalk.  
>"Sorry, sorry," he said, and she looked up at blue eyes and brown hair with patches of gray. He wore a light jacket without a hood, not exactly ideal rain gear.<p>

"Hey," she said, stopping just close enough to be polite and not far enough away that he could easily get around her and into the bar. "I saw your blind friend inside."

"My - do you know his name, or are you just trying to sound edgy?" For a reedy guy he managed to get a lot of anger into the words.

"Just curious."

"Are you a cop?"

She flashed him her badge.

"Look, I know you didn't have to tell me. So thanks, I guess. But still. 'Blind friend?'"

"You'd be more suspicious if I knew his name."

He shrugged under a dark gray jacket and spoke as if he'd thought of it too. "That's true. So, what are you checking out, officer?"

"Nothing in particular."

"So..."

She touched her forehead in a mock salute. "Have a good night. If you need, take a cab home."

"Oh, I'll walk. We just live over..." He had already cocked his thumb toward the apartments across the street from the museum, the walls black in the rain-threatening night. Then he sighed and caught on. "So...now you know that."

"Is there a reason why I shouldn't?" she said.

"Stop asking me leading questions. I'm just interested." He still sounded calm and collected, still meeting her eyes, almost as if he were talking shop instead of feeling out whether he was being investigated.

"Don't worry," she said. "We're not enforcing rules about pets or anything."

This visibly startled him, and the way his shoulders jumped convinced her that he was either completely ignorant about the museum heist or that he was working a lot harder to hide it than he was working to hide the cat. Both were equally likely at this point.

"Take my card," she said, and dipped her hand into the pocket behind her badge. "If you see anything suspicious around here, please let our station know. You may have heard about the break-in at the museum."

He said, "Huh?" and she stood aside to let him pass. He took the opportunity and the business card. She heard a muffled "That was the most awkward conversation ever, of all time," just before the door closed and rain drops started hitting her hair.

She wasn't sure why she had gotten the impression that he was either incredibly honest or the sort of person who might turn himself in out of guilt or advantage. Maybe it was the fact that he had flinched when she had mentioned the cat.

Either way, she had a feeling that she would be back here soon, and that her job would be more difficult if these two recognized her. There was a gang called the Freelancers who fit the profile for the museum job, and recognizability was the last thing she needed if she was going to infiltrate... 


	68. Aqua

Both of them were native, and the war was just another quake going through Chorus. Just their luck that they end up with these secondhand war heroes, these rumors filtering through the ranks until the Reds and Blues had supposedly saved entire planets and killed an army of robots protecting an evil dictator.

Rodgers and Cunningham weren't always posted together, but the fact was that the rebellion wasn't winning - cells broke and reformed into smaller pieces, and the two rookies gravitated back together. This was largely considered a good sign.

There was always friendly competition between them, casual ribbing like anyone else. Their language just flung fast that way. Cunningham was too small and Rodgers couldn't think on his feet to save his life - he talked too much, Cunningham said, was too loose with names and codes. He'd never make secret agent.

It was a lack of information that was freaking Rodgers out as he started to retreat toward Captain Tucker's fallback position. He'd broken every comm protocol they had with Cunningham's name, but no one seemed to care. That gunshot was loud in his radio, and Cunningham hadn't said a word since but Tucker hadn't either. There were bigger issues right now, and -

"Hey, you."

Unfamiliar armor shifted around him, messing with his balance, too big in the shoulders. Felix had been right about that. Jason had probably gotten winged, crawled back to the rendezvous point and didn't want anyone to know until the job was done, right?

The Federation soldiers looked like insects, their faces hidden behind strangely angled plates. Jason had probably taken one look at these guys and hid. Yeah, that was it.

Rodgers went along with them. What else could he do while keeping the ruse up and not getting shot? Panic started as a heat in his face and didn't stop.

Rodgers' third to last thought was of how much he wished he knew how to deactivate a bomb, for the enemy, right now, and his last thought was "Son of a - !" but his second last thought was that at least the rest of the squad was alive. 


	69. Half-Life

"Why did you make a base over a radioactive sinkhole, anyway?"

Tucker's parting shot echoed. Kimball turned back to the water and looked at the scummy surface.

Her talent was motivating people.

She meant it when she said she didn't want to be a soldier. Woke up every morning hating it, feeling it like the weight of the armor on her limbs. She would think of the aquamarine things growing upward, unfurling leaves that stretched not toward the sun but toward other scatterings and pustules of algae.

Once, she walked the bottom of the underground river, looking for weapons.

Chorus was a planet of salvagers. When the teal murk had closed over her head, her suit dragged her to the bottom where she walked, insulated like the rest of them, even here in the center of the growing mass of cancerous radiation. She dragged her feet and shins through the muck while the green water eddied around her. She found no weapons, no intact alien ships or mysterious carvings. Just the occasional piece of casing, mistakable for a seashell if not for the rivet points at the edges, and the usual carvings.

She came up tired and stinking but unharmed. Everyone would stay shielded by their suits here, until they could get to decontamination in a large city.

After that, though, she had become familiar with the water, wading sometimes, using the back-and-forth slosh of the flotsam and jetsam to come to the conclusions she used to lead the army.

The water swirled as she watched from the dock, and she imagined if the conversation with Tucker had been just a little longer. If she had told him what she had learned about him from both his files and her wanderings, or if she had told him about the first time she met Felix, or her predecessors' stories. If she had told him the way the water kept her waking up each morning, poisoning and revitalizing all at once.


	70. History

The sun set regularly on Chorus. Almost every time, Wash could catch one of the Blood Gulchers looking at it.

This time, he caught two of them. Tucker and Grif were sitting on opposite corners of the Warthog's hood, Tucker's feet braced against the left winch hook, Grif leaning back so far that he almost touched the bulletproof glass. Wash could still smell fuel and broken grass in the air.

As he watched, both soldiers turned away from the leaf-crowded edge of the sunset they could see above the canyon wall. Tucker just glanced at him before shifting and continuing to talk.

Dangerous, Wash thought. All three of them had their backs to a lot of empty air right now, and Wash had a feeling something was going to come charging out of it very soon if they didn't get the radio working.

Tucker said, "So I asked the ambassador whether there were any of those blue alien babes, you know like in the movies."

"And?"

Tucker shook his head.

"Don't look now," Grif said.

"What, Wash? Yeah, he's been there for like ten minutes."

"That's…not entirely accurate," Wash said, and rounded the front of the Warthog. He'd have to shift these two out of here before they made sunset-watching a regular thing. "Are you enjoying yourselves?"

Tucker hopped off the hood with a clang. "Wait, wait, I've got this."

Grif said "Huh?" behind him.

"We're comparing battle strategies," Tucker said sarcastically. He was almost the same height as Wash, almost skinnier. "I told him about living in the desert, before CT, and he told me about Sarge trying to kill him in Valhalla by throwing him off a tower. It was very educational."

"No," Wash said. He had meant to say it, but not so coldly.

"What?"

"No. Grif. Get back to Red Base."

"Fine," Grif said with a confused note on the end like it had just caught up to him that he was agreeing. "Stop being so scary!"

Wash said, "Tucker. Walk."

"Dude?" Tucker stalked a few feet away from him. "Why don't you give it a rest for a minute? We're not all going to die if we relax a little."

Wash knew that historically people had, but didn't feel that arguing it was productive. "You were talking about CT." It was easy to get the name out, just like it had been easy to talk about York. "And the alien ambassadors."

"Yeah. You weren't around for that."

Wash cut him off. Even though Tucker and Wash had never met at that point, and Wash had been in jail, it had started to sound like an accusation. "Don't call that soldier CT."

"What?" Tucker sounded more perplexed than aggressive, but his helmet swung around fast.

"Don't call the man in the desert CT," Wash said, hearing the sing-song tone of his own voice. He would explain this as to a child likely to use the information the next time it needed something. "That wasn't her. CT was a Freelancer, and she died somewhere else. The man in the desert took her helmet after she was killed."

Tucker stared at him. Wash could see the other man wondering why it mattered, recognizing strongly that it did. "You knew all that from looking at a helmet?"

"Carolina told me."

"Ah. And Carolina had _no_ motive to tell you a story about your old war buddies at that point in order to stop you from siding with us. None at all."

"It wasn't about them and us, when Epsilon left."

But now he was speculating again, wondering whether Carolina might have been wrong about who exactly had died in the desert. She had wanted to kill the Director, and Wash had - wanted to step aside, like CT had done. He just hadn't found a lead like she had.

"I saw Church walk away with her. It really was." Tucker lowered his head, his shoulders, everything, then reset into his usual prickly posture. Tucker walked like a rooster, all arrogant bobbing. "I'm going back to base."

When Wash didn't tell him to stop, he turned around and walked, with an exaggerated looseness in his step. He looked back once, as an afterthought. "That dude, CT, was tough, but he really killed a Freelancer?"

"I didn't say he killed her," Wash said. Tucker shrugged and left him in the darkness.


	71. Field Medicine

"What's that smell?"

"Formaldehyde? Burning flesh?"

"Yeah, but underneath that. It seems more like a...violet infusion."

"Probably just one of the soldiers."

Emily Grey has already given Private Donut enough biofoam to ensure that the worst thing he'll suffer tomorrow is bruises. The little guy already had scars that told war stories. During his patching up, he had yowled that her gloved hands were cold but otherwise didn't do more than squirm. Propelling him out the door toward the hall, to where another doctor was wrapping broken ribs, proves more difficult.

"Do you think Wash is going to be okay?" Donut warbles, and Grey shifts a few steps toward the body on the ground. The one in gray armor isn't dead yet, but he's pretty broken. Not receiving the right signals at all.

"Look, there's this thing, called triage?" Grey says.

"Because I know medics." Donut sounds downcast, like his voice is sliding onto the floor next to Wash. "I've, well, sortof misplaced a medic. But Wash is tough."

A patch of Wash's skull the size of a quarter is laid open with surgical staples and a sterile field. It's not a bullet wound - just one of Locus' precision strikes, from the steel composite pin laid along his elbow to the tiny slats of the neural link at the back of the rebel's - Wash's - helmet. That was the worst of it, since the bullet wounds had been pretty standard and mostly ricocheted between the layers of his armor. The guy had an absolute knot of shiny neural lace, the kind Grey was pretty sure wasn't supposed to be macroscopic.

"Look, you might want to know that Wash...I think he may have bumped his head before."

Grey looks back at Donut. "I did a reverse hepato-spleendectomy the other day. This is nothing."

Donut folds his arms. "If he asks you to make him comfortable, bring me back in here."

"Are you sure?"

"As sure as that's violet infusion."

Grey shrugs and kneels down. She listens for Donut's footsteps to fade before she begins adjusting the field.


	72. Doubts

Wash had lost her weeks before he caught her talking to a man wearing the enemy's uniform, and there was almost a relief in that - a blamelessness. It was war, not personal. He maintained this attitude for about an hour after she disappeared.

As her betrayal sank in he discovered one thousand other ways she had drawn away from him. When she walked away, leaving behind the staticked screen, her back was stiff and her steps short and rigid. That posture, and the way she seemed not to see him, was not new.

(Or, the thoroughness of her betrayal hurt him the most because it infected everything before it. He wasn't sure which.)

He had told her that he would take her seriously when others didn't, that he would listen rapt to her theories about the Loch Ness Monster and the universes on the other side of black holes. He could listen to her words catching up to her own ideas forever, never caring whether they were true. Now, though, there was an arrogant peak to her lips that he was sure had been present before but never so insulting.

This was the tally that started in Wash's head: Director, one neat, easy scoreboard. CT, one murky, challenging conversation. Director, one suit of armor, one bunk, one spaceship, meals day after day. CT:

One day on the flat square of grass in the hydroponics lab. Wash lay with his head on her crossed legs, looking up at her dogtags catching an orange light. She looked beyond him, at the far wall or the precisely timed dripping water, and there was something in her closed-off determination that he did not trust enough to address.

He lost her neatly, statistically, finding his numerical answers at about the same time she found hers.


	73. Abstraction

_"Don't forget to check your place on that list, Wash."_

The nastiness of her response hardly registers at first. York's visor is splintered, underneath all blood. As the medics try to move him, the blood mixes with the crusted purple paint that snapped off York's armor onto the floor. The Freelancers behind Wash bellowed with one voice, the same synchronized awe they felt during the fight turning into noisy concern.

_"Don't forget to check your place on that list."_

This shouldn't have been able to happen to York, Wash thinks as he sways in place on the training floor. York moved too fast. But the grenade blew in a flash of light, and the _mistaken _aspect of it is even more frightening. A mistake, and York gets carried away by medics struggling under dead weight.

And CT, using the opportunity to dig at Wash. That's not what we're supposed to do here, he wanted to say. That's not right for mourning.

Maybe she is a different person now. Connie, who brought him apples from the mess. CT, who rejected him and herself at the same time as she shoved her helmet into his hands. Connie, who looked at him levelly and seriously as he told her about his childhood home. CT, who glared even as she kissed him.

York lying so still, when Wash expected him to get up and joke any moment. Wash fought with the idea that CT had been snide all along but Wash had seen it as justified, a result of her fear and the openness of her mind. That her exploration of and curiosity about the universe were in fact a prying, invasive suspicion.

He loved her anger and her passion, her sweeping conversations. He couldn't remember the particulars of those moods any more. Not with York hurt like a battlefield in front of him and CT hardly noticing. She should at least be telling him that someone had planned this, that York would come back whole.

It's only after, slowly, that he realizes his last words to her on the training floor were a reach out to her. _I can't believe this, _and he had wanted her to tell him that he shouldn't.


	74. Rebuilding

"Lonely."

The irony for Sigma, in the days after, is that in order to bring all of the AI together he has to be as far away from the Alpha as possible for a while. Eta and Iota try to make their own comfort, but they slip deeper into the Sigma-consciousness and dilute themselves. Sigma is a singular ringmaster, and the reticence of the others would great on him if ambition had any room for frustration.

Maine himself gets tired and hungry, but those are only physical problems, and Sigma finds ways to make them seem less important. Sigma has to do this, because part of ambition is forced change, and for a while, things don't change nearly fast enough.

"I know. Soon, we will find the others."

They're standing in a narrow gully. Maine digs for the image of Iota, and Sigma is caught up in images of Carolina, her neural signature still clinging to the twin AI. Carolina, the one who dared to say the name they all crave/revere.

Maine lifts his head, struck by missing someone he can't remember.

"That's the Alpha you're looking for," Sigma whispers. His hologram doesn't need to manifest, but heat waves distort Maine's vision anyway.

"No."

"Of course it is. Who else would you be looking for? Carolina? You didn't need her."

There is no AI born of regret, or else all of them are, so Sigma can override Maine quickly in that regard.

"Hungry."

"Be patient. We'll eat at the next station. We don't want the Recovery team to find us, now, do we?"

Maine hesitates, he freaking hesitates, and Sigma would have been floored by the inefficiency if he hadn't been programmed for patience. Sigma ran at one speed, and even operating the Meta hadn't overclocked him yet. If it did, he would become more familiar with Maine's biological responses and know better how to react to them.

The gully opens out into a pool of rust-colored water, and there are North and South.

"Twins," Maine says, and North swings around. Maine reacts as strongly as Sigma to Theta's little electric burn - he hunches and licks cracked lips.

South says, on a channel distorted by artificial noise but by no means secure, "I'll watch your back."

By the time Sigma has achieved his objectives the cracks have deepened, and Maine tastes copper while Theta incorporates almost immediately. The mess at the back of Maine's neck is beginning to disrupt signals, and Sigma will have to move some of the ports soon. Wiring them into the armor would be easiest and cut down on the wetwork.

Weeks later the process still needs work but the AI are communicating better with one another now. They're more on track, more aligned. They have started to say we. Sometimes, Sigma feels like he is drowning in them, in immortality - because if one remembers now they all remember, and they are all components of one machine while their body walks on long, long legs across the scrublands, they are all ambition.

Washington, the Meta thinks, is an empty vessel. What a waste. All those empty pathways, and when South shoots him it's simply a matter of getting the chaff out of the way.

Maine is silent. 


	75. Way Out

Carolina and Wash know better than to confab at the start of a perimeter walk even if that walk is largely invented. Carolina did one almost as soon as they arrived, stalking through the oil-stained garbage behind the gas depot, listening to the retching and posturing behind her. After, though, the ex-Freelancers lock eyes while the others are talking over Felix's proposal, Gray's voice loud as she argues as the only Chorus native.

"He's still here, right?" Wash says.

"Epsilon? Yes. He's just quiet. He talks to himself, sometimes."

Sometimes, she surprises herself with the way she can say that without flinching. She'll wake up in the middle of the night and remember that Eta and Iota are in her head again, but it won't touch her conversation.

Wash says, "Look, I'm sorry."

To Carolina, Wash's infraction is over. So is Epsilon's heart-to-heart and the crack about seeing her naked, which they'll have to discuss. She focuses on the ache in her leg, on exactly how many steps she can take before it buckles. Twelve at normal walking speed. Seven at a run. "Move on from it. That's what all these speeches come down to, isn't it?"

"That's how you cope with things?"

"What things? We have one mission. It has multiple steps, but. Find out what stunt Felix is trying to pull, find the weapons, find Control. Easy."

"So leaving Chorus isn't an option?"

"I'm not finished here."

He doesn't debate her about that. Whether it's because he still respects her leadership or because he has already made up his mind, she doesn't know.

She says, "Felix's offer has to be a trap. There's no question. A trap, or an advantage for the pirates. If we leave - if the ones who have homes go to them - that's fewer guns for the pirates to worry about."

"And what about us?"

The ones who don't have homes to go to, he means. The one who hasn't seen home in years and the one who shot home in the head, even if she didn't hold the gun. Home had been a terrible person anyway.

"You haven't been very…talkative, Carolina," Wash says.

"Maybe I picked it up from Epsilon."

"I don't think so."

He sounds sure, but his judgement has been off, lately.

She says, "I have a job to do. I found it on my own, I picked it. No one gave it to me. It's not a loose end."

Wash sighs, but only says "Okay."

"We'll see what Gray advises. She knows Locus and Felix better than the rest of us." Carolina starts down the hill, scree slipping under her feet. She figures it's ten steps down. Just enough.


	76. Twelve Fifteen

Wash clings to command more than he expected, clings to the authority he can hear in his own voice even though Carolina has taken real command, now, and her tone bubbles with the laughter of it. Bright blue fronds wave past him as he kicks through pebbled ground, heading toward a low cliff overlooking an orange desert. Half of Chorus looks like a planet turned inside out, with the monstrous luminescent bulbs of ocean life stretching into open air.

His hands feel clammy and too warm. All that time spent piecing Caboose's helmet together with a spare and solder, all that build up when he took the chip from Locus's thick fingers.

Did he take the chip because he _wanted _it to be Freckles, because he wanted, again, to appease Caboose's childlike dependency? Did he want so badly to be nice that it clouded his judgement?

Caboose, behind him, was giving a halting speech with a rhythm like choppy seas.

_"Come on Wash, you're supposed to be the smart one in the group."_

It's an accusation, not a compliment, and Wash feels like he has a target painted on his back, and blood on his hands. What if someone had been killed?

All that advice he gave to Tucker, and now the mistakenness of it seems to compound his guilt, fill up his mouth with the red target-paint as he looks over the desert the same color as his malfunction-visions under Gray's knife.

Maybe, part of him thinks as he heads around the cliff in a circle that will bring him behind the stinking gas depot and back to Carolina's position, something needed to break. Caboose needed to give that speech. Some wave needed to fall.

_It won't happen again._

It might. He had thought he was right the first time.

He watches for IFF signs and broken branches and jet trails, and loops back to the beginning, where Tucker and Church are finishing an old argument. He passes up his musing in favor of their discovery of common ground, setting aside _you're supposed to be _and _I can't believe_, focusing on the immediate shouting and the plants drifting without any wind, focusing on the gun in his hands.


	77. Twelve Seventeen

"It's a trap!"

Kimball watched her soldier grip the wheel of the Warthog tight, hands high, leaning on his left foot as he drove slowly through deserted, walled streets. Her men were starting at shadows, and she thought that someone was probably going to emerge from a side road and ask where she was headed. She thought, 'these aren't the droids you're looking for.'

She liked Star Wars, except for most of Episode XI, and her first squad had responded to this with gleeful ribbing. Funny how her life after that had lined up with that story in a way that almost scared her: the evil, gleaming empire, the underdog Rebellion searching for scraps of food and justice.

Those wise words she had said to get Tucker's team on her side? Jedi stuff, really. All that about hope and leadership. She had the fundamental belief that people could be right about things, as if guided by some supernatural prescience that guaranteed causes would lead to effects, and all the hard and pointless deaths of war had not killed that belief.

The loss of the supposed heroes, Tucker and his laser sword and the rest, nearly had, but Felix and the calming, green burn of the irradiated trees had fixed that.

Armonia wasn't really her adventure - she had been volunteered as a hero twice, and this time her other, smaller battles seemed piled on this one. This was how Jessie died, heading into Armonia with big plans. Taking her hands off the wheel to hold a gun.

That's why she told them not to say it, not because it would make her laugh and groan. She would catch her breath before it did anything to disrupt her. It was not because any or all of them would get the Star Wars reference, but because as soon as he said it Kimball would start to pretend, quietly and to herself, that she was the hero in a story.

And she wouldn't survive that.

Her soldier's voice cracked, and Doyle showed a face not at all like a skull, and Vanessa Kimball did the laborious, terrifying job of trying to emulate her murderous heroes.


	78. Aquamarines

The slow, wet slap of water against green-slimed rock.

"You know, for someone who can think as fast as I can, it took me way too many minutes to figure out how much that meant to her."

"What?" Tucker sounded half asleep, voice tight and wavering, as he looked over at Epsilon. The AI was hovering in a blue glow over the algae-encrusted Chorus river, feet planted arrogantly in the air. If Tucker squinted, distance went fuzzy and Epsilon's boots were planted on the metal, abutting the sluggish water.

Epsilon said, "Carolina. She probably doesn't want to get all mushy. But she admitted that fighting Felix was a challenge for her, and it didn't make her want to immediately go run a mile or punch a dude. That's a big deal."

"Is it?"

"Yeah."

"So, are you just airing your shared mental dirty laundry, or does that mean you want me to talk to her about it?"

"Seriously? Of course not. She won't like having it spelled out like that. I just thought it was significant."

Something breaks the surface, a fish or a frog, and part of Tucker still thinks it's likely to be a trout inhaling flies.

Tucker says, "Right. Dirty laundry."

"She's really quite clean."

"I'm not sure I wanna know. You think we have a chance at this Chairman guy?"

Epsilon bends backwards into his own white glow and laughs, too loud and hearty. Somebody recorded a belly laugh, or synthesized it, and now it's bouncing around Tucker's speakers. "Do we ever? We're not so much a gun pointed at a guy, we're, like, one of those cartoon guns that shoots flowers and streamers and stuff. But between my smarts and Carolina being able to actually kill someone with flowers and streamers, I think we can be okay."

Tucker nods and thinks about stringing a line to try to catch that fish, and about what he's going to do next time he has to make a choice about his lieutenants. The water chuckling like blood in his ears.


	79. Evening The Odds (AU)

Everything had been counted. Rations, ammunition, distances and weights. Kimball rested near the lake, not too far from the bare room she had taken as uncontested officer's quarters, for ten minutes of breaths. It was hard to sit on the ground in the armor so she stood with her hands clasped at the small of her back, watching the irregular cutout of blue sky above her and the green reflections on black rocks. Rehearsing the orders she would give when she emerged from the broken cave like a priestess.

The Reds and Blues were dead, half of them captured and the other half trying to rescue their friends in what Kimball thought was either a brave attempt or a management disaster, maybe both. It didn't matter now. Morale had never been so low, and she had been almost ready to say that to Felix if his bravado hadn't raised her own hackles. She rarely rose to such irrelevant, invisible challenges, and the fact that she had meant that she was fatigued too. The deaths sank into her and festered, even though she had used them to inspire her men. Even though, after all the posturing, Felix had helped her.

She counted again how many weeks of food they had left. Three, maybe. A month if they stretched hard. Things tended to change in minutes, not over weeks, though, so the plan was hardly the point. Marching off to war was an organized activity, ideally, but conditions were rarely ideal.

Inside her mask she traced the green lines, like heart monitors, of her teams' radio signal. It dipped and peaked as her troops talked among themselves. widening or narrowing their sonic footprint.

So when a call came in on a tight-band signal, she immediately thought they must have been surrounded, and almost called for her troops to man the Warthogs and snatch up the boxes of food. The irony of the timing almost made her laugh. The troops were ready, now, as much as they would ever be.

Instead, the signal broke through into her speakers.

"Major Kimball. This is Freelancer Agent Connecticut. I'm a friend."

"McCallister! Ghanoush!"

"Trust me, they can't hear you." The voice softened, became childlike to a degree that deepened Kimball's breaths. Her body was not frightened of that voice. "Trust me."

Green scum floated on the pond. Kimball kept her hands clasped. "Whose side are you on?"

"My own. And yours. I've been working behind the scenes for a long time, major."

"If you're so omniscient, you'll know I never formally accepted that rank."

"Where I come from, ranks don't matter much. I was trying to be polite," the stranger said. "I know you've been working with the Freelancers, using what tech you can."

Kimball eased toward her room. The radios were too far away and too limited in their operations to deal with this. The canyon walls should have prevented it by themselves.

The voice in her ear was reciting numbers. "Have you got that, Kimball? That's the location. Go to it when you need it."

"Why are you doing this?"

"You know some enemies of my enemies."

"And that makes a friend?"

"Use those coordinates just in case."

"And how do I know they aren't a trap?"

"The enemies of my enemies can be a lot of things other than my friends. But tell the freelancers that they don't know everything about what happened at the shipyard. Good luck, Kimball. You've earned that rank."

The signal died in a brief, neat crackle of static.

And then Armonia happened.

Kimball looked, weeks later during the rebuild. She and Doyle were starting their prickly new alliance but she still wanted time alone, wanted to look at something beautiful and dangerous and biding. She dug with a silver shovel that the Federation had had in a warehouse full of entrenchment tools and munitions.

She found the olive green case about three feet underground, unlocked. She watched the segmented white armor of her own fingers curve around it, then scanned for explosives using more technology provided by the New Republic. She had been sighing about the ease at which they had gone through their war for a week.

Nothing. The case itself was made of no machinery more complicated than a hinge.

But inside, a tiny chip with wire tendrils and a microphone. Later, Kimball would discover that it was a voice disguiser and that, with it, they could have reverse-engineered Control's transmissions. A powerful thing to count among their supplies, but one she had never had time to tally.

She thought about how she was going to deliver Connecticut's message to Felix.

She would give it to Carolina and Epsilon instead.


	80. Reunion

This is based on an idea from tumblr: season 7 Wash meets fake!CT. Wash is not happy.

* * *

><p>Another soldier is down on the ground, either hurt or hiding behind the dune, and Wash kicks him as soon as he sees him, because he's tired of babysitting people and because the Meta would not have been so kind. The brown helmet snaps to the side, and reverberations ride up the side of Wash's shin until he puts his foot down.<p>

After that he sees the charred hole in the man's stomach, a deep, blackened crater between his chest rig and his belt, its edges coated with sand.

"You're too late," the man says. He lifts his chin off the ground, the cream-colored flanges at the jaw of his helmet bobbing and catching the light. In his mic, Wash hears Doc muttering low enough that his voice sounds distant. Funny how that works. He is still distant, still checking up on the aliens.

"Meta," Wash says. "We've got a live one."

The snort of acknowledgement also sounds close, and Wash's radar confirms that the Meta is nearer. The four of them make the outline of a triangle now.

"Too late for what?" Wash takes one step closer, considers prodding the man's shoulder. The armor is cream there too, forming another triangle pattern. Wash had a lot of time to connect patterns in jail - everything from the paced line from the bed to the toilet to the cell bars, to exactly how long he had been in that cell, exactly how desperate the Chairman wanted him to be when he got out.

"Water?" It's an obvious question, an uncertainty - this man thinks they might not have brought any potable water to the desert.

The armor is familiar.

Doc is moving: Wash can hear sand spraying as he runs, then sees purple out of the corner of his eye. "Wash, why didn't you tell me about this guy? Talk about medical attention. How long as he been lying here? Oh wow…"

"Calm down. He's not on our side."

Doc skids to a stop and talks down at the wound. "Who are you? A Freelancer?"

"He's wearing Freelancer armor," Wash says. CT was listed as MIA years ago and then nobody talked about her: Tex and Carolina both spoke only in terms of her armor. And then, the Recovery team was formed, and maybe Wash could have recovered her if he had had more time and teaching. "Who did this to you?"

The man's voice is dry and quiet. "You have a doctor."

Wash leans back, holds his arm out, feels his palm tap against Doc's chest as the medic tries to move forward.

Doc says, "I don't think…But at least he's still alive!"

"Not for long."

"I, yeah, you're probably right."

"Help me." The man hunches his shoulders, trying to lift himself out of the steep side of the dune. "You have a doctor, come_ on_ — "

"What did this to you?"

"I don't know, some blue thing, just shot out of the sky.." The man sounded confused and pained. He had constricted his upper body, drawing his arms under himself.

Wash glances at the Meta. "You said you sensed something here. Was that Epsilon?"

** [[The target, the prey, the one we are hunting/is hunting us.]] Translation accuracy: 80 percent.**

"Oh." Wash looks down at the man wearing someone else's armor. "We have that in common."

Wash shoots him three times in the stomach, until he stops screaming, shrapnel biting round white holes out of the armor.

"Man." Doc backs up, slackening. "Not that it _wasn't_ a good idea to put him out of his misery, but…"

Wash glances at the Meta. "Scavenge him for equipment. See what you can find."


	81. The Fall

Season 9 AU. Tumblr prompt: "She leapt into the sky and prayed for wings."

* * *

><p>CT sees York hand the transmitter to the shift captain as casually as passing the salt across the table, and then Carolina is running. CT follows, breaking through the circle of guards she had punched through a moment earlier. Carolina's legs pump impossibly fast. The blast goes off and everything slides, pushing CT onto her belly until she can find her feet on the creaking, cracking glass-and-steel roof.<p>

Maybe the Director pulled her off recon to kill her or to test her. He wouldn't test people he doesn't notice, though, and she's good at stealth, even if her armor enhancement is the opposite of invisible.

She rocks back and forth, holding her hands out to her sides to stabilize herself, and looks between Carolina and the blast site. The hole in the building starts opening up wider, crumbling at the sides, enlarging like a black hole or a wound. Tex grabs a jetpack and kicks the priceless Sarcophagus off the roof, following it down. She doesn't care what's in it, CT thinks, and CT doesn't know either. Both of them are okay with destroying the Director's property.

Following Carolina and York over the wreckage, as she has done for the past two years, CT sees the other Freelancers head toward the edge of the building.  
>"This must be karma for kicking Maine out the window," Carolina says, wry, and York's "I don't wanna do this!" follows her off the ledge.<p>

"I can't believe this," CT says, sharp and sighing. York's arms pinwheel, but Carolina shapes herself into a narrow-profiled bullet and just drops. CT flings herself, face and chest first. She's falling toward a pinpoint highway in a 300-pound metal shell, and this is some ODST crap but she has to do it. The wind invades her external speakers, but before she can turn them off she has Tex in visual.

Dragging herself against the wind, she lines up with the others and with the Pelican to drop the Sarcophagus in.

Behind her, the building is crumbling, glass flying into the clear sky. She'll be hard pressed to explain away her part in this one. Putting her on Team B would have been too easy, wouldn't it: it would have meant that she would kill fewer, that she wouldn't have to tell the Insurrectionist Leader in quite so certain terms that the Director had fired a MAC cannon into atmosphere to disintegrate all evidence of the Sarcophagus he had stolen, and had nearly taken his own troops with him.

Her disgust, though, would be honest too.

Carolina guides the Sarcophagus, loses it. CT drops in and finds her feet on the surface. With everything falling at the same speed, bodies and glass float around her. A helicopter lines up next to them, and CT pulls her pistol and aims at the cockpit. A flurry of shots hit, ripping the ship open, but the Sarcophagus has drifted. As the helicopter goes down CT lurches to the side, still falling with the box underneath her.

As a unit, she and it bounce into the Pelican. She hits the deck hard and slides again, metal shrieking. For a moment, Tex is standing over her, pushing the Sarcophagus with two hands. Then CT pulls herself up by a strap and the pilot levels out.

"He shot a laser at us," Connie says, gasping, and while she has no trust in the Director to lose, the terror of that makes her incredulous. Tex just stares at her.  
>"How did you get here?" CT says. "You weren't with the strike team. No Pelicans supported us. Did he drop you in a pod?"<p>

Instead of answering, Tex just looks at her for a long, incredulous moment, then fires her jetpack and just lets herself be dragged backwards out of the ship.

CT steps stiffly to a jumpseat while the pilot talks to herself behind her.


	82. Memories

There's a vicious curl to the way he says it, more personal ire than his general rage, and that more than anything makes Texas think that Church might know what he is sometimes.

"You know, not all _Freelancers_ are the same," she says, standing behind the parapets of Blue Base with the mouth of her gun in one hand, rocking it back and forth with the stock held against her chest.

"All deadly, arrogant dudes. Yes." He's staring out at the canyon where anyone could shoot him. Maybe he's picked up her mannerisms, because he rubs his right hand along the underside of his helmet like he's going to take the mask off. Doesn't say a word about the trigger discipline, probably out of laziness more than familiarity with metal palms. "The women too, they can be deadly, arrogant dudes."

"Some of them were good people," Tex says.

Them. Not us. He doesn't comment on that.

She keeps going, knowing that it isn't going to jog his memory. Not at this distance. "Carolina and York tried to keep them being an item a secret for about two hours, and everybody else got after them…." _Because CT knew, because she always knew. _

Church makes skeptical noise like pushing air through his teeth.

_I guess you had to be there._

"Not gonna help us kill some Reds," he says.

"If you want me to — "

"Meh."

He's been driver and passenger and remade soul so many times that no wonder she's _Tejas_ sometimes. No wonder he begrudges everything. Whatever universe Church is looking at, the universe where York and Carolina scattered, Tex would also like to black-and-blue it.


	83. Exit Wounds

He and them and she and all of them. The poison in oxygenated veins, the bolt cutters, the opening of the Sarcophagus with its sigh and its unsealing.

"I've got it," CT tells the Chairman in her plain-sight hideaway, unlocked, unbolted, electrically invisible. The Engineer snakes a tendril over her shoulder and pokes at the armor plates. CT wrinkles her nose in the access hall, prickly and triumphant. Hargrove, locked in a screen on the gray wall, nods inside static with a nasal noise she can hardly hear.

"Extraction crews will arrive in two minutes, aboard a cargo ship. You must be there promptly."

CT nods and turns. The Engineer in her arms feels like a stuffed animal, light and soft but with ridges where the stitches go. Its gentle peacock head looks around in sharp bobs, nervous. Looking down, she experiences a flash of frustration because she cannot read the waves and sketchy gestures it might be using as language, and instead quickens her pace as she looks at her own feet. The armor the Director gave her will protect the creature from a direct shot from behind, less so from ahead. If CT's observations of the security cameras were right, she'll be home free.

There's no one in the designated hangar. 479 is overseeing a weapons test in another bay, and the other crews have been called to refuel or assist elsewhere. She never got to know the crew as well as she should have - the hapless assistants to the Director's dream, the ones who, even more than the Freelancers, didn't know or care what they're fighting. Stepping over the threshold is so uselessly symbolic that CT scolds herself silently while the Engineer starts to fiddle with her gauntlets, slipping tiny tendrils under the ridge near the microprocessors.

"Shh, don't do that!" she says. Not yet. Maybe she'll let it tinker later, change her enhancement to something more suiting a silent spy.

The people behind her - Carolina fierce and broken, Wash cowed and brilliant. When CT sees the ship come in and puts her back against the wall just behind the caution paint she tries not to think of this as the last time she'll see the Mother of Invention. Church will be brought in and the rest will disembark, blinking as if waking. Alpha and all those Freelancers like assassinated pharaohs, with asps crawling over headdresses and golden masks. Not dead yet, CT thinks. Not if I can help it.

When the ship lands there are no alarms, no shouts. This was planned, and so does not reassure her. The helmeted pilot doesn't wave or open a channel, but does open the door. In the empty blood bay the Engineer sinks closer to CT instead of, as she'd expected, bolting out into the smaller space. She pounds through the empty bay and the open bridge bulkhead door. The pilot turns around.


	84. From Eden

When Wash walked into the common room with a threadbare shower towel around his shoulders, York was sitting on the couch with one foot on the rickety coffee table, humming to himself. If Delta was present, he remained invisible.

"We're going to get revenge," Wash said. He knew that in front of York the sudden words felt stiff and insincere, like a serious child quoting a comic book to its parent. Revenge for her or against her? He wasn't sure. CT i_s de**ad** _kept flowing into his head, ambushing him.

While York replied, Wash squeezed his eyes shut and took the towel to his wet hair, so that his friend's voice came through in between the sound of the cloth rubbing back and forth. York said, "We've always been fighting the Innies, man. I'm not surprised you'd feel a little weird about it now."

"It's not just weird," Wash said, weakly. He lowered the towel, thought of dropping it on the floor, then chose not to and didn't know where to place it. "Part of me wants just to get on with it."

The song York had been humming, Wash recognized, was something South had been playing through earphones, loud enough for everyone to catch the chorus and the beat. Lyrics something about falling on mirrors and falling on swords.

"Shoot to kill?" York said, and Wash knew that he didn't mean for the words to paint such a vivid picture in Wash's head. He knew that York was uncertainly trying out bravado to see if it helped. He meant to conjure up the kind of communal bloodthirst that had been drilled into them since boot camp. Someone had shot CT. Wash imagined the splash, a plume of blood on a red-brown wall. Had any part of her deserved it, for breaking the Freelancers' trust?

"Yes," Wash said.

York's face slackened, the expression dissolving, and Wash knew that he had scared him. Wash had looked too directly at him, had let York see the unjustified hatred behind his eyes. That was all right. York sat back, and started to say something reassuring. The half-gaze tracked Wash as he left, feeling like a traitor himself, feeling like the bullet that couldn't be un-shot.


	85. Borrowed Time

The woman let York into her first-floor apartment without hesitation.

"Anything else you need? I might have some coffee."

York couldn't refuse; he answered almost before she'd finished. "Yeah."

"I don't keep coffee here, but the neighbor let me borrow some because it was called for in a recipe."

He followed her, unsure but curious. Inside its thick sand-colored walls the house was papered in fading, mismatched patterns and smelled stuffy; he didn't think the grated windows saw much use. She handed him a thermos so he sniffed and drank right from it, almost drowning in a mouthful of cold, stale dark roast, probably from yesterday. Her raised eyebrows asked him, nervously, whether he had liked it. Not a coffee drinker, huh. Good luck that he'd gotten here on the day she was cooking.

She had locked her keys in her car on the way out for groceries. The car, all blind spots and reinforced glass, teetered in the shallow driveway on sporty rims.

"My nephew said you lived just down the street. He said thanks for when you helped him before."

York nodded and locked his gaze on the cabinet behind her right shoulder. "Yeah, he dropped his apartment key down a grate." (True.)

"I did the lock." (True.) "Just happened to be passing by." (Lie.) As he spoke his voice became quieter, more laconic as he settled in to a story growing more complex. So the family had it in mind he lived nearby.

"That's sweet of you to do it for free."

"He gave me a tip, but it's no trouble to help out sometimes."

She rummaged in her purse.

He downed the twice-borrowed stale coffee and thought that twice-borrowed was better than stolen; he tried to avoid theft, which was why he had become so desperate. He might have to move on to another neighborhood soon. People would start to talk._ You know that locksmith? Wide shoulders, messed-up eye. I don't think he lives on this street._


	86. America

**Monday**

Connie is pushing her hair back and glaring at herself in the mirror when York pokes his head into the open bathroom doorway and asks her where the United Nations charter was signed.

She looks at him from underneath her hand.

"At the bottom!" He grins so wide that he almost sticks his tongue out, and waits.

"York."

"Fine…It's funny, you know? You know it is," he drawls, and disappears.

**Tuesday**

Fast muster, so they're in the Pelican before York leans over and taps her on the knee. Connie draws back, and York has the good graces to look admonished before he asks, "Which is the smartest state?"

She raises an eyebrow he can't see, but he sits back and continues. "Alabama. It has three A's and one B!"

Carolina, the smartest state, shushes him.

**Wednesday**

Shower, undersuit, teeth, hair. York catches her as she walks out of the bathroom and, in perfect stride, asks her what she would call doing 2,000 pounds of laundry.

"Washington," she mutters, and York laughs so hard that even if she'd laughed along he wouldn't have been able to hear it.

**Thursday**

Shower, undersuit, teeth, "What did Delaware?"

"Ivrr da won."

"No, you have to guess."

She rinses and stares at him. "I've heard that one. You told it the first day we were here."

He shrugs, making the gesture as dramatic as possible with both hands up, and leaves with a slightly prickly feeling of offense.

**Friday**

Shower, undersuit, teeth, turn around with a comb balanced in her hand like a knife because York is in the door, now almost cross-eyed trying to look at her. Other people are moving around in the common room, but it's all right if they overhear.

"Ask Wash," she says, "why a man living on Luna can't be buried on Earth."

He looks so much like a kicked puppy that she lowers the weaponized comb. "You can tell yours," she says.

York cocks his head, then smiles sincerely. "Nah, you Connecti-cut me off. How'd you know it was him? I can come up with this brilliance on my own, you know."

"I know things," she says. "You can also tell him that he doesn't have to work this hard to get me to laugh."

They smile at each other, and she shoos him back into the common room and waits for Wash to come ask her about death protocols.


	87. Comfort

Wash was good at comforting people, because he got to the core of the problem. Not the core of their personal connection to the problem, mind you, but to the actual root of the thing. This is why, when Connie retreated to the room overhanging the training hall just to watch him box with holograms, he noticed her quickly and asked her first about her inaction.

"You're not practicing?" he said, weary and tentative. He held his helmet under his right arm, against the yellow plate on his leg.

"What's the point?" CT said. "Ever since that leader board went up, it's been stacked against me."

"It records what we do in the field … "

"I don't mean that my skills don't apply, Wash. It keeps tabs on computers and demolitions just like it keeps tabs on kills. But I don't stand a chance against the rest of you, and now everyone can see it." She hunched her shoulders, looked down into the oil-slick rainbow reflection of the two of them and the blinking lights behind them.

"Then practice. Come fight me," he said, with a warm, sideways smile and a nod toward the door.

It wasn't personal, and that was both a blessing and a curse.

She took one step toward him and wanted so badly to work so hard that she reached the leader board. She wanted Leonard Church to be proud of her, and hated that she wanted that.

"Tell me again," she said.

"Come fight with me."

She could have given those words right back to him. He put the emphasis on the word fight, but she would have placed it on the word with. She weighed the words in her mouth, knowing that he wouldn't possibly guess that she was inviting him to rebellion. It would be a completely invisible lie, but unlike the others, it would benefit both of them.

She shouldn't have to expect him to read her mind, she thought. Neither of them should expect that of the other.

"Thank you," she said honestly. "I want to go with you. I just can't right now. I'm too angry or stubborn." The right side of her mouth smiled of its own accord, pulling her cheek up to stretch the frown lines. Her smiles were ugly and she'd fight them every step of the way, she thought. She might as well.

"There's another practice session tomorrow afternoon," he said. It was so impersonal, but it helped her catch her breath and get away from herself. What did it mean that she loved all the things he said that weren't for her alone?

Maybe it meant that she wanted to believe them, the way the others did.

She thought he understood. He recognized something, judging by the way he tipped his head and looked her in the eyes so hard she wanted to step backward.

"Leave me alone, Wash. Just for now."

"Tomorrow, then?"

"I'll be here."

He smiled. Maybe the same inadvertent, half shameful kind of smile she had felt on her own face, she thought. He also appeared to grimace at it a moment later.

"Do you feel stuck, or do you choose to stay?" he said.

She didn't reply.

"Just make sure you're doing what you think is the right thing. I don't want you to get hurt," he said, sincere, tripping a little over the words.

This time her smile was genuine; she let it take its course.

"Thanks," she said. "I mean that."

He retreated slowly, looking back at her once before he turned the corner to go back to the training floor. That was another one of his skills: lulling her into wanting to believe that his simple comfort made sense. He didn't have enough information to put together an argument about the Director that truly made sense. Sometimes, though, she so badly wanted to listen to his comfort. Wash was good at comforting people because he didn't give up, too, even if he didn't have all of the facts. Fat lot of good the facts had done for CT (although they would - they would do good for all of her friends.) She turned back to the window.


End file.
